A negative keyword is a word or phrase you add to a Google Ads or Microsoft Advertising campaign to stop your ads showing for searches that contain it. Where ordinary keywords tell the platform which searches you want, negatives tell it which ones you do not, and they are the most direct control you have over wasted spend.
How negative keywords work
When someone searches, the platform first finds advertisers whose keywords match, then removes any whose negatives match the search. A private physiotherapy clinic in Bristol bidding on “physiotherapy” might add “NHS”, “jobs”, “course” and “degree” as negatives, so it does not pay for clicks from people looking for free treatment, vacancies or training.
Negatives come in three negative match types, and they behave differently from positive keywords:
- Negative broad (jobs): blocks the search if it contains every word in the negative, in any order.
- Negative phrase (“free quote”): blocks searches containing those words in that order.
- Negative exact [cheap physio]: blocks only that exact search.
The key difference is that negatives do not expand to close variants. Adding “job” does not block “jobs”, and a common misspelling needs its own entry. You can place negatives on an ad group, a campaign, a shared negative keyword list applied to several campaigns, or at account level through account-level negative keywords, which also apply to Performance Max.
Why it matters
Match types have loosened over the years, and broad and phrase match now reach searches that share your meaning rather than your exact words. That reach is useful, but it means a share of every budget goes on searches you would never have chosen. Negatives are how you take that share back.
The cost of skipping them is easy to see in any search terms report. A removals company paying for “removals jobs London”, “how to move a piano myself” and “council bulky waste collection” is spending money on people who will never book. Each click might be only a few pounds, but across a month those pounds can amount to a large slice of a small business’s budget.
Negatives also steer traffic inside your own account. Adding a campaign’s core terms as negatives in a neighbouring campaign stops the two competing for the same search, so each search is answered by the ad and landing page written for it.
Common mistakes
- Launching a campaign with no negatives at all and waiting for the search terms report to reveal the waste.
- Adding a broad negative that is too wide, such as “cheap” for a business that sells value products, and silently blocking good searches.
- Forgetting plurals and misspellings because negatives do not match close variants.
- Blocking your own brand name in a non-brand campaign without making sure a brand campaign covers it.
- Adding negatives at the wrong level, so a term blocked for one service also blocks it for another where it matters.
- Never reviewing old negatives when the business adds new products or services.
How to act on it
Before launch, build a starter list from what you know about your market: jobs and careers terms, training and course terms, free and DIY terms, competitor or unrelated product names, and places you do not serve. Put universal exclusions in a shared list or at account level and service-specific ones on the campaign.
After launch, review the search terms report weekly for the first month and fortnightly after that. For each irrelevant search, add the shortest negative that blocks it without catching good searches, and choose the match type deliberately. Keep a note of why each broad negative exists, so the next person does not remove it. Building and maintaining negative lists is a standing part of how I run Google search ads.