Google Ads negative keywords: find the search terms burning your budget

Quick answer

Negative keywords exclude irrelevant searches from Google Ads campaigns. To find them, open the search terms report, sort by cost, flag terms that spent without converting and show no buying intent, and add them as exact or phrase negatives at the campaign level. Repeat every week, and add plurals and misspellings yourself.

How do you find terms to add as negatives?

1. Open the search terms report for the last 7 to 30 days.
2. Sort by cost.
3. Flag terms that spent, did not convert and show the wrong intent: free, jobs, course, meaning, or a competitor you do not want to show for.
4. Add them as negatives with the right match type and level.

Which match type should a negative keyword use?

One detail from Google Ads Help matters more than the match type: negative keywords do not match close variants. A negative on glasses does not block glass. Plurals, misspellings and variants need their own entries, and nobody adds them for you.

Campaign level or ad group level?

Campaign level when the term is useless for the whole campaign. Ad group level when the term is good but belongs in a different ad group, for example negating a product name in the generic ad group so that search lands in the specific one.

For terms no campaign should ever show for, such as jobs or free, use an account-level negative keyword list: Google applies it to all eligible Search and Shopping inventory in relevant campaign types. Keep your own brand name out of that list. An account-level negative would block your brand campaign too. To keep prospecting campaigns off brand searches, negate the brand at the campaign level, only in those campaigns.

How do you create a shared negative keyword list?

A negative keyword list is a set of negatives saved in the account's shared library and applied to many campaigns at once. Edit the list and every campaign that uses it changes. The limits Google Ads Help gives (checked October 17, 2026):

1. In Google Ads, open the shared library and its negative keyword lists.
2. Create a list named after the intent (for example, "Negatives: jobs") and paste the keywords, one per line, with the match type for each.
3. Apply the list to the Search and Shopping campaigns that should follow it.
4. In Performance Max, Google Ads Help says you can pick an existing list when adding negatives; there, they only apply to Search and Shopping inventory.

Lists by intent beat one giant list per client: you can apply "jobs" everywhere and keep "course" off the account of the school that sells courses.

Which negatives should every new account start with?

Before the first search terms report exists, start with a short list of terms that almost never buy, and adjust it by niche:

The column on the right matters more than the list: a negative that is obvious for one client is the core keyword for another. This is why one shared list copied across every account is dangerous.

How do you run the routine across many accounts every week?

1. Block a fixed weekly slot for search terms, account by account, in order of spend.
2. In each account, only review terms above a spend threshold that matters for that client; the long tail can wait for the monthly pass.
3. Add negatives at the narrowest level that solves the problem, and log in one line what you blocked and why.
4. Once a month, check whether any negative is blocking a keyword you actually bid on, and remove it if so.

How do you do this with fewer clicks?

In the Ads Editor Google manager, the search terms tab has a negate action right in the row: pick the match type (exact, phrase or broad) and the level (campaign or ad group) without switching screens. The same action works from an AI chat: adding a Google negative keyword is one of the two most used actions in the Ads Editor MCP, with 1,168 measured requests between May 14 and September 23, 2026 (see Meta Ads MCP usage data).

Since October 11, 2026, Search terms, Negative lists gathers the account shared lists: create a list with keywords and campaigns at once, add keywords (one per line; in brackets for exact, in quotes for phrase, the rest broad), remove keywords, and apply or detach the list across many campaigns. It is the way to handle negatives that apply to the whole account, such as jobs and free, without repeating them campaign by campaign.

The routine this belongs to is in how to manage Google Ads for multiple clients.