This article investigates the adaptive guaranteed‐performance consensus problem for high‐order nonlinear multi‐agent systems (MASs) with switching topologies, and briefly analyzes the special leader‐following situation. To further handle the problem of adaptive guaranteed‐performance consensus for higher‐order nonlinear MASs with switching topologies, two novel distributed control protocols are introduced, which are applied to the leaderless and leader tracking cases, respectively. In addition, the methods based on the linear matrix inequality (LMI) and Riccati inequality provide the judgment basis for the stability of Lyapunov function theorem. Eventually, the theoretical results are efficiently and successfully validated by numerical simulations.