Every Google Ads campaign has two kinds of traffic: the traffic that converts and the traffic that drains your budget while your competitors win the customers you should have had. Negative keywords are what separate these two streams.
Used well, negative keywords do not just cut waste — they improve Quality Score, raise CTR, feed Smart Bidding cleaner signals, and make every dollar you spend work harder. Used poorly — or ignored entirely — they allow Google's increasingly broad matching behavior to spend your money on searches you would never consciously bid on.
In 2026, with AI Max and broad match consuming more budget than ever and Performance Max now supporting up to 10,000 negative keywords per campaign (increased from 100 in early 2025), getting this right has never mattered more.
Why Negative Keywords Matter More Now Than They Did Before
The Google Ads of 2019 was largely a keyword-controlled environment. Exact match meant exact match. Phrase match stayed close to the phrase. Advertisers had granular control over which queries triggered their ads.
That environment no longer exists. Broad match now interprets queries through semantic intent — meaning your keyword "marketing software" might trigger searches for "business productivity tools," "sales enablement platforms," or "project management apps." AI Max for Search, launched in 2025, goes further still, using AI to expand reach across queries you never explicitly bid on. Performance Max operates across all inventory types with minimal query-level visibility.
In this environment, what you exclude is as strategically important as what you target. Negative keywords are the guardrails that prevent automation from optimizing its way into irrelevant traffic. They are also the mechanism by which you give Smart Bidding cleaner signals — because every irrelevant click that does not convert tells the algorithm your ads are less effective than they actually are for your real audience.
The Three Match Types for Negative Keywords (and When to Use Each)
Negative keywords have their own match type system, which works differently from positive keyword match types. Understanding the distinction prevents the most common mistakes.
Broad match negative blocks any query containing all the negative terms, in any order. If you add "free" as a broad match negative, your ads will not show for "free marketing tools," "marketing tools free trial," or "get marketing tools free." This is your widest exclusion tool and is most useful for intent filters you want to block completely across any context.
Phrase match negative blocks queries containing the terms in the specified order, with words potentially before or after. Adding -"how to" as a phrase negative blocks "how to set up Google Ads," "how to manage PPC campaigns," and "how to optimize ads" — while allowing "Google Ads how-to guide." Use this for informational queries you want to exclude without accidentally blocking adjacent commercial queries.
Exact match negative blocks only the precise query, nothing more. This is your scalpel — surgical exclusion of a specific search that is costing you without producing value. Use exact match negatives when you want to block a specific query but preserve related variations.
One critical technical note: negative keywords do not match close variants. If you add "marketing agency" as a negative, "marketing agencies" and "marketing agencys" will not be blocked. In practice, this means actively adding plural and alternate forms when they are relevant.
The Strategic Foundation: Four Categories Every Account Should Exclude
Before looking at search term data specific to your business, there are four categories of exclusions that apply broadly to almost all commercial accounts.
Intent mismatches are searches that use your industry vocabulary but signal non-commercial intent. "How to," "tutorial," "DIY," "what is," "definition of," "free template," "example of," and "guide" all indicate a user in research mode who is not ready to buy. For lead generation and e-commerce campaigns, these searches rarely convert and should be excluded. (Keep them if you are running content marketing campaigns with awareness goals.)
Employment and job-related queries are a silent budget drain in many B2B accounts. If you sell marketing software, you are also triggering searches from people looking for marketing jobs, marketing internships, and marketing manager salaries. Adding "jobs," "careers," "salary," "internship," "resume," and "hiring" as account-level negatives eliminates this entire category.
Academic and competitive research covers queries from students, researchers, and competitors auditing your market. "Case study," "research paper," "thesis," "vs" (when used for comparison by non-buyers), and competitor brand names (handled carefully, depending on your strategy) often generate clicks that never convert.
Price-signal mismatches target the wrong end of the market. If you sell premium software at $500 per month, "cheap," "budget," "free," "affordable," "low cost," and "discount" attract buyers whose price expectations are incompatible with your offer. If you offer free trials, these exclusions would be wrong — but if you do not, they are generally valuable.
Building Your Account-Level Negative Keyword List
Account-level negative keywords apply to every campaign in your account simultaneously. They are your most efficient exclusion tool because you maintain them in one place and they propagate everywhere. This saves hours compared to maintaining the same list across dozens of campaigns.
Start with the four intent categories above, customized for your industry. Then add any terms that are clearly irrelevant to your entire business — not just to specific campaigns. A SaaS company might add "near me," "store," and "in store" since they have no physical retail presence. A B2B platform might add "personal," "residential," and "for home" to filter out consumer searches.
Build your initial account-level list before launching campaigns, because every impression that accumulates while the list is missing has already cost you something. Then review and expand it monthly using the search terms report.
Mining the Search Terms Report: Your Best Source of Negative Keywords
The Search Terms Report shows the actual queries that triggered your ads and generated clicks. It is where you find real-money waste with the specificity needed to act on it. The workflow:
Navigate to Keywords → Search terms. Filter the date range to the past 30 days. Sort by cost descending. Look at every query that spent money without generating a conversion. Ask two questions: Is this query clearly irrelevant to my offer? Or is it potentially relevant but just not converted yet?
Clear irrelevance — a query that uses your keywords but is seeking something completely different — becomes a negative keyword immediately. Uncertain relevance — a query that sounds plausible but has not converted — should accumulate more data before exclusion. Do not add negatives based on single-click data.
The search terms report is also valuable for finding patterns. If you see twenty variations of "how to" queries all generating clicks without conversions, adding -"how to" as a phrase match negative eliminates the entire pattern in one action. This n-gram analysis — looking at common two and three word combinations across many queries — is more efficient than adding individual terms one at a time.
Negative Keywords for Performance Max Campaigns
Performance Max campaigns now support account-level negative keyword lists and campaign-level negative keywords (up to 10,000 per campaign after the March 2025 expansion). This is a significant development because PMax previously offered almost no query-level control, leading many advertisers to run PMax alongside Search campaigns without adequate guardrails.
The critical PMax negative keyword strategy involves preventing cannibalization of your branded search traffic. If you have a dedicated brand campaign running on Search, PMax can also pick up branded queries — splitting impression share and attribution between campaigns. Adding your brand terms as PMax negatives ensures that branded traffic flows to your intentionally structured brand campaign rather than into PMax's attribution black box.
PMax also commonly captures navigational searches for competitors and adjacent products. Review the PMax Search Terms report (now available, also added in March 2025) to identify which query categories are getting significant PMax spend and whether they warrant exclusion.
B2B-Specific Negative Keyword Strategy
High-ticket B2B campaigns have a specific problem: the vocabulary of your target buyer overlaps heavily with the vocabulary of students, researchers, and junior employees who will never buy. A query for "enterprise CRM software" might come from a VP of Sales with budget authority or from a college student writing a paper about enterprise software markets.
B2B campaigns benefit from role-based filtering at the keyword and negative level. Adding terms that signal non-buyer intent — "for students," "internship," "junior," "beginner's guide," "learn how to," "what is" — filters out a significant share of non-converting traffic without touching the queries from real buyers.
Intent layering with audience targeting adds a second filter: using Customer Match lists of actual customers as observation audiences allows you to see which query types are converting and which are not, giving you data-driven negative keyword decisions rather than intuitive ones.
For B2B with long sales cycles, timing matters too. Query terms that signal very early-stage research ("what is," "definition," "overview of") often produce leads that take six months to close — which is fine if your campaign goal is pipeline development, but problematic if you are optimizing for fast-conversion CPA and your window is 30 days.
The Overcorrection Trap: When Negative Keywords Hurt
The worst version of negative keyword strategy is aggressive exclusion that cuts off potentially valuable traffic. This happens in three ways:
Adding broad match negatives that are too general. Adding "free" as a broad match negative, for instance, might eliminate traffic from queries like "free shipping," which could be relevant for e-commerce. Or "how" might eliminate "how much does it cost" — a strong commercial intent query.
Excluding based on single data points. A keyword that generated one click without a conversion is not evidence of a bad keyword. Add negatives based on patterns across meaningful sample sizes, particularly for lower-volume terms.
Building excessively large negative keyword lists to compensate for poor campaign structure. Negative keywords are most effective when combined with tight ad group organization and relevant landing pages. If you are adding hundreds of negatives to make a poorly structured campaign work, the negatives are masking the underlying problem rather than solving it.
A useful check: after adding significant new negative keywords, monitor impression share and click volume over the following two weeks. If impression share drops dramatically, some negatives are blocking relevant traffic.
Shared Negative Lists: Managing at Scale
For accounts with many campaigns, shared negative keyword lists let you define a list once and apply it to multiple campaigns simultaneously. Create themed lists: "Intent Exclusions," "Job/Career Terms," "Price Sensitivity Terms," "Competitor Brands." Apply them at the campaign level based on which exclusions are relevant to each campaign's goals.
Shared lists are also easier to maintain. When you identify a new category of irrelevant traffic in one campaign, adding it to a shared list immediately excludes it from every campaign that uses that list — rather than requiring manual updates across dozens of campaigns.
Measuring the Impact of Your Negative Keyword Work
The impact of a well-maintained negative keyword strategy shows up across multiple metrics, though it takes two to four weeks of clean data to see it clearly.
CTR rises as the ratio of relevant impressions to clicks improves. Cost per conversion falls as budget concentrates on higher-intent queries. Quality Score tends to improve because the historical CTR signal gets cleaner. Smart Bidding improves because it is now training on a higher proportion of genuine buyer behavior.
The metric that directly shows you the financial value of your negative keyword work is cost per conversion before and after. For most accounts with under-maintained negative lists, systematic exclusion work reduces cost per conversion by 15 to 30 percent without reducing the volume of valuable traffic. That is not optimization at the margins — it is budget recovery.
Spending hours combing through search terms reports? ClickHub surfaces the waste in your campaigns automatically, flagging high-spend, zero-conversion queries and grouping them into actionable patterns — so the work that takes hours becomes minutes.