Negative keywords in Google Ads are terms you add to stop your ads from showing on searches you don’t want to pay for. They’re the cheapest and fastest way to cut wasted spend in almost any account, and in most of the accounts we audit, nobody has touched the list in months. So before you touch a bid strategy or rewrite an ad, look here first. A neglected negative keyword list is usually where the money is leaking.
Key takeaways
- Negative keywords tell Google which searches to skip, and in most audited accounts they’re the fastest way to reclaim 10 to 20% of wasted Search spend.
- Unlike regular keywords, negative keywords don’t match close variants, so plurals, misspellings, and synonyms have to be added on their own.
- In March 2025 Google raised the Performance Max negative keyword limit from 100 to 10,000 per campaign, so PMax can finally be controlled like Search.
- Broad match blocks a whole theme, phrase match blocks a context, and exact match removes one query, so picking the right match type matters more than the size of your list.
- The Search Terms report, sorted by cost and filtered to zero conversions, is the only reliable place to find negatives worth adding.
What are negative keywords in Google Ads?
Negative keywords are exclusion terms that keep your ads out of searches you don’t want. They work backwards from normal keywords. A regular keyword tells Google what to match. A negative keyword tells Google what to ignore. Add “free” as a negative and your ad stops competing on searches that contain the word free.
Here’s the part that trips people up. Negative keywords don’t behave like the keywords you bid on. When you bid on a keyword, Google expands it to close variants: plurals, misspellings, and words it thinks mean the same thing. Negatives don’t do that. If you add “plumber” as a negative, Google still shows your ad on “plumbers” and “plumbr.” You have to add the plural and the common typos yourself. That single quirk is behind a lot of “but I already blocked that” confusion, and it’s worth knowing before you build a single list.
Why negative keywords matter more in 2026
The short version: the pool of searches your ads can match has gotten much bigger, so the odds of paying for junk went up. Three things pushed it there. Broad match is now the default pairing with Smart Bidding, close variant matching keeps widening what counts as a match, and 25.11% of Google searches now trigger an AI Overview, according to Conductor’s 2026 research (Conductor). Each change adds queries to the auctions you sit in, and plenty of those queries were never a fit.
The cost of ignoring this is real money. In the accounts we and other agencies audit, unmanaged negative keyword lists tend to drive 15 to 30% of non-brand Search and Shopping spend straight into searches that never convert. And a wasted click isn’t as cheap as it used to be. Costs per click on competitive non-brand terms have climbed year over year, so the same irrelevant click drains more budget than it did two years ago. That’s a service business paying for “plumbing jobs” and a store paying for “free” shoppers, month after month, on autopilot.
Broad, phrase, or exact: which negative match type should you use?
Pick the match type by how wide the block should be. Broad match negatives take out a whole theme, phrase match negatives take out a context, and exact match negatives remove one precise query. Most wasted spend we find isn’t from missing negatives. It’s from the wrong match type on the ones already there.
| Match type | What it blocks | Best for | Where it fails |
|---|---|---|---|
| Broad | Any search containing all your words, in any order | Whole categories you never want, like “jobs” or “DIY” | Overblocks when a word has mixed intent (e.g. “free”) |
| Phrase | Searches containing the phrase, with words allowed around it | A specific unwanted context you want gone | Synonyms Google treats as close variants can slip past |
| Exact | Only the exact query, in the exact order | Surgical removal of one query | Misses every variation of the same intent |
The classic mistake is throwing a single word in as a broad negative and walking away. Add “free” as a broad negative and you block “free trial,” “free consultation,” “free quote,” and “toll-free” all at once. For a home services company that runs a “free estimate” offer, that one negative can wall off some of its best searches. Our rule: use broad only for words that are never relevant to you, and drop to phrase or exact the moment a word could show up in a search you’d actually want.
Where do you add negative keywords?
You can add negatives at three levels, from narrowest to widest: ad group, campaign, and account through shared lists. The level sets how far the block reaches and how much upkeep it creates. Ad group and campaign negatives are quick to apply but stay put where you added them. Shared lists are where the real payoff is, and where most accounts leave money on the table.
- Ad group level. Best for stopping one ad group from stealing another’s traffic. If one group targets “crm software” and another targets “free crm,” the paid group holds “free” as a negative so the right ad serves.
- Campaign level. Best when an exclusion applies to a whole campaign but not the rest of the account. A brand campaign might block competitor names here.
- Account level (shared lists). Best for universal blocks. Build one shared list of job-seeker terms, free-intent terms, DIY searches, and competitor names, then attach it to every relevant Search and Shopping campaign. New campaigns inherit it at launch instead of bleeding money until someone notices.
A couple of limits worth knowing. Account-level negatives cap at 1,000 keywords. A shared negative keyword list officially holds up to 5,000, though through 2025 a number of advertisers reported lists accepting more without errors. You won’t hit those ceilings on a small account, but they shape how you organize a big one.
How do you find negative keywords worth adding?
The answer is one report: the Search Terms report. It shows the actual searches that triggered your ads, not the keywords you bid on, and it’s the only honest source for what to block. Everything else (the keyword planner, a hunch, last quarter’s list) is a guess about queries your account might not even serve.
Open a campaign, click Insights and reports, then Search Terms. Sort by cost, highest first, and filter to zero conversions over the last 30 to 90 days. Now you’re looking at the searches spending money and returning nothing. A few will be queries you want to keep working on. The rest are your negatives. One caveat: Google rolls up low-volume searches under “Other,” which has hidden 20 to 30% of queries since 2020, so you’re never seeing the full picture. Clean the visible queries and the “Other” bucket usually shrinks along with them.
Here’s how that plays out. Say a Tampa plumbing company runs a Search campaign at $4,000 a month. In the audits we run for home services clients, the same leaks show up again and again. Pull the report, sort by cost, and you’ll often find spend piling up on “plumber salary,” “plumbing jobs near me,” “how to fix a leaky faucet,” and “plumber Orlando.” None of those is a customer. The job searches are people who want to work there. The how-to search is a DIY homeowner who will never call. The Orlando search is 85 miles outside the service area. Block the job and salary terms with a broad “jobs” and “salary” negative, block the DIY pattern with phrase negatives like “how to fix,” and add the out-of-area cities. On a real cleanup, catching a handful of patterns like these routinely frees up a chunk of budget to move back toward searches that actually book work. That reclaimed spend usually funds better Google Ads management rather than getting burned on window shoppers.
A starter negative keyword list you can steal
Most guides tell you to build a list and leave you to figure out what goes in it. Here’s an actual starting point. These are the categories we load into a shared list before a new Search campaign goes live, so the account isn’t leaking during its learning phase. Adjust for your business, but this covers the usual suspects.
- Employment: jobs, careers, salary, hiring, employment, internship, resume, “near me jobs”
- Free and cheap (for premium or paid offers): free, cheap, discount, coupon, wholesale, bootleg, secondhand
- DIY and education: how to, tutorial, DIY, guide, “do it yourself,” instructions, youtube
- Research and comparison (until you’re ready to bid on it): reddit, forum, meaning, definition, examples
- Competitor names: your direct competitors’ brand terms, unless you’re running a deliberate conquest campaign
- Home services extras: other cities and counties outside your service area, “warranty,” “repair manual,” “parts,” and job-board sites like indeed and ziprecruiter
Add the employment and DIY buckets as broad negatives, since those words are never a fit. Add “free” and “cheap” as phrase or exact if you run any free offer, so you don’t accidentally block “free estimate.” This list is a floor, not a ceiling. The Search Terms report is where you build on it every week.
Negative keywords in Performance Max: what actually changed
Performance Max used to be a black box, and for a long time you could add only 100 negative keywords per campaign. That’s changed. In January 2025 Google rolled out campaign-level negatives for PMax, and in March 2025 it raised the cap from 100 to 10,000 per campaign, matching Search (Google Ads Help). PMax can now be held to the same query discipline as a Search campaign, if you actually use the room.
Most PMax accounts don’t. In the audits we run, campaigns built before 2025 still operate as if the 100-keyword cap were law, which leaves a real leak open. The single most important PMax negative to set is a brand exclusion, so PMax stops absorbing your own branded searches and inflating its reported return. Keep in mind that negatives only apply to Search and Shopping inventory. They won’t stop your ads on YouTube, Display, Gmail, or Discover, so PMax will always have placements that keyword negatives can’t touch.
Common mistakes we see in every audit
The failures repeat across industries and account sizes, and each one is fixable in an afternoon. Our take: the problem is rarely that a team doesn’t know the answer. It’s that nobody has had the hour to do the work.
- No shared list at launch. A new campaign goes live with no baseline negatives, and the first 60 days leak on jobs, free, and competitor searches. Fix: build the starter list above and attach it before launch.
- Broad match that overblocks. A broad “free” negative quietly kills “free consultation” and “free quote.” When conversions drop 20% right after a negative change, an overreaching broad negative is almost always the cause. Fix: demote it to phrase or exact.
- Stale negatives nobody revisits. A negative Paid campaigns may begin producing useful data after launch, but timing, lead volume, and cost depend on the market, budget, offer, competition, tracking, and implementation. Fix: sweep your highest-impression negatives every quarter.
- PMax left uncontrolled. The manager assumes negatives aren’t available, so PMax eats brand traffic and reports a return that looks better than the real one. Fix: use the campaign-level list, now allowed up to 10,000 entries.
Get a second set of eyes on your account
If nobody has reviewed your negative keywords in the last 90 days, your account is almost certainly paying for searches that will never turn into customers. The Search Terms report is the place to start, and the starter list above will stop the obvious leaks today. If you’d rather have someone run the full cleanup and keep it clean, that’s exactly the kind of work our PPC team does, and it pairs closely with the home services marketing accounts we manage across the country. Want to see what your account is leaking? Get in touch with Ardoz Digital and we’ll take a look. For a sense of what you should be spending in the first place, our guide on how much Google Ads cost in 2026 is a good companion read.