What are negative keywords

A negative keyword does not attract traffic, it subtracts it. It acts on a set of searches that targeting has already declared eligible, and removes from that set everything containing the excluded term. That is why it only makes sense after you have decided what you are buying, never before.

It is worth distinguishing it from pausing a keyword. Pausing withdraws one specific positive keyword and leaves the others intact, and those can still be matched to the same search by meaning. An exclusion acts on the search, not on the keyword, and blocks serving regardless of which positive term would have triggered it.

It is also not a quality filter or a signal for the bidding system. It does not improve relevance on its own and does not tell Google what you prefer, only what you refuse to pay for. The effect on quality arrives indirectly, because irrelevant traffic stops accumulating impressions without clicks.

The biggest source of confusion is that a negative keyword is written with the same notation as a positive one, quotation marks and square brackets included, while the rules behind it are different. That asymmetry is the usual cause of exclusions that fail to block what the advertiser assumed.

An exclusion can sit in three places. At ad group level it affects only that group. At campaign level it affects all of its ad groups. At account level it applies automatically to all Search and Shopping inventory across the relevant campaign types. On top of that there are negative keyword lists, reusable sets that can be applied to several campaigns at once.

Negative match types are written like the positive ones and work as follows. Negative broad match, with no symbols, blocks a search containing all the terms of the keyword, even in a different order. Negative phrase match, in quotation marks, blocks when the exact terms appear in the same order, with extra words allowed. Negative exact match, in square brackets, blocks only when the search is exactly those terms and nothing else.

Here is the asymmetry that costs the most money, and it is worth reading on its own: negative keywords do not match close variants. Excluding running shoes blocks neither running shoe nor trainers. Plurals, singulars, synonyms and derived forms all have to be added by hand, one at a time. The only exception is capitalisation and spelling mistakes, which are handled automatically.

There are limits worth knowing before designing the system. An account allows up to 20 negative keyword lists, with up to 5,000 terms per list. At account level, up to 1,000 negative keywords apply. And a search longer than 16 words may not be blocked if the excluded term appears from position 16 onwards.

The decision that depends on this is where each exclusion sits and how broadly it reaches. A negative broad match at account level is convenient and dangerous: it blocks across every Search and Shopping campaign, including the ones that wanted that traffic. A negative exact match in one ad group is surgical and does not scale.

The practical criterion is permanence. What you never sell goes to account level or into a shared list. What only gets in the way in one campaign stays in that campaign. What separates two ad groups on the same topic stays in the ad group.

Performance Max campaigns inherited only account-level exclusions for a long time. Since 2025 negative keywords can be added in the campaign itself, and an existing list can be applied as well. The limitation that remains is one of reach: those exclusions act solely on Search and Shopping inventory, not on the campaign's other surfaces.

In Demand Gen the approach is different, because there are no search queries to block. The closest equivalent is excluded content keywords, configured at account level in the content suitability section, alongside audience exclusions.

• Take exclusions from your real search terms report, not from a generic list downloaded off the internet that knows nothing about your catalogue.
• Add the singular, the plural and the synonyms of every excluded term by hand, because the exclusion does not cover close variants.
• Reserve shared lists for what you never sell, such as free, jobs, second hand, or the name of a service you do not offer.
• Use negative phrase or exact match when the excluded term also appears in searches you do want, so you do not block too much.
• Record in each list's name which campaign uses it and why, so an old exclusion does not keep blocking profitable traffic.
• Review exclusions when launching a new product: a term blocked two years ago may describe exactly what you sell now.

• Adding a term in the singular and assuming the plural is excluded, when the exclusion does not match close variants.
• Using negative broad match with two or three word terms and unknowingly blocking queries that were converting.
• Placing exclusions at account level that only made sense inside one specific campaign.
• Excluding your own brand name to avoid cannibalising organic traffic, and losing the comparison searches where the brand sits next to a competitor.
• Treating a term as blocked when it appears beyond the 16th word of a long search.