How to Find Negative Keywords in Google Ads: A Step-by-Step Guide

If you're running Google Ads with broad or phrase match keywords, your ads are almost certainly showing up for searches that have nothing to do with what you sell. That's not a bidding problem. It's a targeting problem, and negative keywords are how you fix it.

Before going further, let's get the terminology straight, because a lot of content out there blurs these terms together. A search term is the actual query a real user typed into Google. A keyword is the term you bid on in Google Ads. A negative keyword is a term you add to prevent your ad from showing when a query matches it. These are three distinct things, and keeping them separate matters when you're doing this work.

The problem is straightforward: Google's matching algorithms are designed to cast a wide net. Broad match in particular will trigger your ads on queries that are conceptually related to your keywords, even if the intent is completely different. Someone searching "free project management template" is not the same buyer as someone searching "project management software for teams." If you're bidding on the second and showing up for the first, you're paying for traffic that will never convert.

Negative keywords are the mechanism that closes that gap. But finding the right ones, organizing them properly, and keeping the list current requires a repeatable process, not a one-time cleanup.

This guide walks through that process in six steps: pulling and reading the Search Terms Report, filtering for the worst offenders, using Keyword Planner to get ahead of bad traffic, brainstorming from your own product knowledge, organizing negatives into scalable lists, and building a review habit that keeps your campaigns clean over time. Each step is practical and sequential. By the end, you'll have a clear system you can apply immediately and repeat every month.

Step 1: Start With the Search Terms Report

The Search Terms Report is the most direct source of negative keyword candidates you have. It shows the actual queries that triggered your ads and resulted in a click, along with performance data like impressions, clicks, cost, and conversions. This is real traffic your budget has already paid for, so it's the right place to start.

To access it in the current Google Ads interface, go to the left navigation menu and click Keywords. From there, select the Search terms tab. You can view this at the campaign level or the ad group level depending on how granular you want to get. The report shows each search term alongside the keyword it matched to and the match type that triggered it.

Once you're in the report, you're looking for a specific pattern: queries that consumed impressions or spend but produced zero or very low conversions. Those are your primary candidates. Beyond the numbers, look at the intent behind each query. A few categories to watch for:

Informational intent: Queries containing "how to," "what is," "guide," or "tutorial" often indicate someone researching a topic, not shopping for a solution. If you're selling a paid SaaS tool, someone asking "how to manage projects for free" is unlikely to convert.

Job-seeker intent: Terms like "jobs," "careers," "salary," or "hiring" signal someone looking for employment, not a product or service.

Free or DIY intent: Words like "free," "open source," "template," or "DIY" suggest the user is looking for a no-cost alternative to what you offer.

Competitor brand names: If queries include competitor names you haven't intentionally targeted, you may want to exclude them depending on your strategy.

One practical tip on date ranges: filter the report to at least 30 days of data before drawing conclusions. Shorter windows can be misleading because low-volume terms need time to accumulate enough impressions to show a clear pattern. A 60 to 90-day window is better for identifying consistent waste rather than one-off anomalies.

A common mistake here is adding a negative the first time a term appears without converting. One non-converting impression on an otherwise relevant query isn't a pattern. Look for terms that have spent real budget, appeared multiple times, and still produced nothing. That's the signal worth acting on.

A useful outcome from this step: being able to identify at least five to ten search terms that clearly don't match your offer. If you can do that, you're ready to move to filtering and prioritization.

Step 2: Sort and Filter to Surface the Worst Offenders

Scrolling through a raw Search Terms Report without filtering is a slow way to find problems. Sorting and filtering lets you rank terms by the damage they're doing so you can address the highest-impact issues first.

Start by sorting the Cost column in descending order. This puts the most expensive search terms at the top, regardless of whether they converted. Any irrelevant term sitting at the top of this list is a priority. You've already paid for it, and if it keeps running, you'll keep paying.

Next, sort by Impressions to catch high-volume terms that might not have spent much per click but are consuming a large share of your ad's reach. A term showing up thousands of times with no conversions is a volume problem even if the individual CPC is low.

Then apply filters to isolate the clearest cases of wasted spend. In Google Ads, you can add a filter for Conversions = 0 combined with Cost greater than a threshold that makes sense for your account. What that threshold is depends on your average cost per conversion, but a practical starting point is any term that has spent more than your target CPA with zero return.

As you work through the filtered list, group the terms by intent category. This makes the next step, adding negatives, much more systematic. Three broad categories cover most cases:

Informational intent: "How-to" queries, "what is" searches, and research-stage terms. These users are learning, not buying.

Navigational intent: Competitor brand names or specific website searches. The user knows where they want to go, and it's not to you.

Transactional but wrong product: The user wants to buy something, but it's not what you sell. A B2B software company showing up for consumer-facing searches is a common example of this.

The Search Terms Report also includes a Search term match type column, which tells you which of your keywords triggered each query and under what match type. This is useful context. If a broad match keyword is responsible for pulling in most of your irrelevant traffic, that's both a negative keyword problem and potentially a match type problem worth addressing separately.

If you're managing multiple campaigns or working across client accounts, export the filtered list to a CSV before moving on. Reviewing offline and building a consolidated list is easier than working through the interface one campaign at a time. A well-organized export also becomes the foundation for your shared negative keyword lists in Step 5.

The goal at this stage: a prioritized, categorized list of irrelevant search terms, ranked by cost and volume, ready to act on.

Step 3: Use Keyword Planner to Find Negative Candidates Proactively

The Search Terms Report is reactive. It shows you what has already happened. Keyword Planner lets you get ahead of bad traffic before it costs you anything, which is especially valuable when launching a new campaign or entering a new market.

To access it, click the Tools icon in the top navigation of Google Ads, go to Planning, and select Keyword Planner. From there, choose Discover new keywords and enter your core product or service terms.

Keyword Planner returns a list of keyword ideas related to your input. Most of them will be legitimate candidates for your positive keyword list. But scan the results carefully for terms that share your words while signaling a completely different intent. Those are your proactive negative candidates.

To make this concrete with an illustrative example: if you sell project management software, Keyword Planner might surface terms like "project management certification," "project management degree program," or "project management book." All of these contain your core term, but none of them represent someone looking to buy your product. Adding these as negatives before your campaign goes live means you never pay for that traffic in the first place.

Pay particular attention to high-volume irrelevant terms. A low-volume term that slips through costs you relatively little. A high-volume irrelevant term that matches your broad keywords can consume a significant portion of your budget quickly. Volume data in Keyword Planner helps you prioritize which proactive negatives matter most.

One important clarification: the terms you find in Keyword Planner are keyword ideas generated by Google's tool. They are not confirmed search terms from your actual account. You're using them to anticipate what kinds of queries your keywords might attract, not reacting to spend that's already occurred. This distinction matters because you'll be adding them as negatives based on predicted intent, not observed behavior. That's a reasonable approach for campaign setup, but it's worth being deliberate about which terms you block proactively to avoid accidentally excluding relevant traffic.

A practical outcome from this step: before your next campaign goes live, you've reviewed Keyword Planner output and added at least one proactive negative keyword list covering the most obvious intent mismatches for your product category.

Step 4: Brainstorm Negatives From Your Own Product Knowledge

No tool knows your business as well as you do. Data-driven methods surface terms that have already appeared or that Google predicts might appear. But your understanding of your customers, your product, and your market will catch negatives that neither the Search Terms Report nor Keyword Planner will flag, especially early in a campaign's life.

The most useful brainstorming method is to start with your ideal customer profile and then flip it. Ask: who would search for my keywords but would never actually buy? What words would they use? The answers become your negative keyword candidates.

A few categories that apply across most businesses:

Job-seeker terms: "Jobs," "careers," "salary," "hiring," "internship." Anyone searching these terms alongside your product category is looking for employment, not a purchase.

Free or DIY intent: "Free," "open source," "template," "how to do it yourself," "DIY." These users are looking for a no-cost solution. If you sell a paid product, they're not your buyer right now.

Student and research intent: "Essay," "case study," "assignment," "definition," "what is," "examples for students." Academic searches often share vocabulary with commercial searches but represent a completely different audience.

Wrong industry or audience signals: If you sell to B2B buyers, consumer-facing modifiers like "personal," "home," or "individual" may indicate the wrong audience. The reverse applies if you sell to consumers.

Beyond these standard categories, look at your own sales and support data. If your sales team keeps notes on bad leads, or if your support team handles tickets from users who clearly misunderstood what your product does, those misunderstandings often trace back to search intent. The language those users used to find you is worth turning into negatives.

Once you've built this list, it can go directly into a shared negative keyword list in Google Ads and be applied across multiple campaigns at once. That's covered in the next step. The point here is that the list exists and is specific to your business, not just a generic set of negatives copied from a blog post.

The output you're looking for: a documented set of negative keyword categories that reflect your actual offer, your actual customer, and the kinds of searches that would never lead to a sale for you specifically.

Step 5: Organize Negatives Into Lists and Apply Them

Having a list of negative keywords is only useful if they're applied correctly. Google Ads gives you several places to add negatives, and choosing the right level matters for both accuracy and efficiency.

Campaign-level negatives apply to all ad groups within a single campaign. Use these for exclusions that are relevant to the campaign's theme but not necessarily to every campaign in your account.

Ad group-level negatives apply only within a specific ad group. These are useful when you need to prevent keyword cannibalization between ad groups or when one ad group targets a narrower audience than the others in the same campaign.

Shared negative keyword lists are the most scalable option, especially for agencies or advertisers managing multiple campaigns. You create the list once and apply it to as many campaigns as needed. When you update the list, the changes apply everywhere it's in use.

To create a shared list, click the Tools icon, go to Shared Library, and select Negative keyword lists. Name your lists clearly so they're easy to manage over time. Useful naming conventions include categories like "Brand Exclusions," "Informational Intent," "Job Seekers," or "Free and DIY." Once created, apply each list to the relevant campaigns from the same interface.

Match types for negative keywords work differently than match types for positive keywords, and this is worth understanding before you apply anything. Here's how each one behaves:

Negative broad match: Blocks any query that contains all the words in your negative term, in any order. It does not block queries that contain only some of the words. This is the default match type when you add a negative without specifying otherwise.

Negative phrase match: Blocks any query that contains the exact phrase in that specific word order, even if other words appear before or after it.

Negative exact match: Blocks only the precise query with no additional words. The user would have to type exactly that term for the exclusion to apply.

The most common mistake with match types is applying a negative broad match for a word that also appears in legitimate, converting queries. For example, if "free" appears in some irrelevant searches but also in a converting query like "risk-free trial," a negative broad match for "free" could block traffic you actually want. Always check your Search Terms Report for the word before applying a broad negative.

For agencies managing multiple client accounts, documenting your standard baseline negative keyword lists, the ones you apply to every new campaign regardless of client, saves significant time and prevents common mistakes from slipping through on new account setups.

If you want a detailed walkthrough of the interface steps for adding negatives at each level, this guide on where to add negative keywords in Google Ads covers the process in full.

Step 6: Make Search Term Review a Regular Habit

Finding negative keywords is not a one-time task. Google's matching behavior evolves, new search trends emerge, and as campaigns mature or expand, they attract new patterns of irrelevant traffic. A negative keyword list that was comprehensive three months ago may have meaningful gaps today.

The practical recommendation is to set a review cadence based on your spend level. For active campaigns with meaningful daily budgets, a weekly review of the Search Terms Report is reasonable. For lower-spend or more stable campaigns, bi-weekly or monthly is sufficient. The goal is to catch new irrelevant terms before they accumulate significant cost, not to review so frequently that it becomes noise.

During each review cycle, the process is the same as Steps 1 and 2: pull the Search Terms Report for the period since your last review, filter by cost and zero conversions, sort by worst offenders, and check for new terms worth adding as negatives. Update your shared negative keyword lists so the changes apply across all relevant campaigns automatically.

Also pay attention to patterns, not just individual terms. If broad match is consistently pulling in off-topic queries across multiple review cycles, that may indicate the keyword itself needs a match type adjustment, not just more negatives layered on top of it.

This is where Keywordme fits naturally into the workflow. If you're spending a meaningful amount of time each week working through the Search Terms Report, exporting to spreadsheets, and manually updating negative lists, Keywordme's Chrome extension lets you flag and exclude irrelevant search terms with a single click, directly inside the Google Ads interface. There's no spreadsheet export, no tab-switching, and no separate dashboard to manage. It's built specifically for the kind of recurring review work this step describes, and it runs right where you're already working.

The practical setup for this step: put a recurring calendar reminder in place for your review. Treat it as standing campaign maintenance, the same way you'd schedule a budget check or a performance review. Negative keyword hygiene doesn't happen consistently without a scheduled trigger.

A clear success indicator: your negative keyword lists are updated at least monthly, your review is scheduled rather than ad hoc, and you're catching new irrelevant terms before they accumulate significant spend.

Putting It All Together

Finding negative keywords in Google Ads is a process, not a one-time fix. Here's the full sequence in brief:

1. Pull the Search Terms Report and look for queries with spend and no conversions. Filter to at least 30 days of data.

2. Sort by cost and impressions to prioritize the worst offenders. Group them by intent category: informational, navigational, or wrong product.

3. Use Keyword Planner to identify proactive negative candidates before a new campaign goes live. Focus on high-volume terms with clear intent mismatches.

4. Brainstorm from your product knowledge. Think about who would search for your keywords but never buy, and document those categories specifically for your business.

5. Organize negatives into shared keyword lists with clear names. Apply the right match type for each term, and check that broad negatives don't block converting queries.

6. Schedule regular reviews. Weekly for high-spend campaigns, monthly at minimum for everything else. Update shared lists after each review.

Negative keyword management is an ongoing discipline. The campaigns that stay efficient over time are the ones with a consistent review process behind them, not just a clean setup at launch.

If the weekly Search Terms Review is taking more time than it should, Start your free 7-day trial of Keywordme and see how much faster the same work goes when you can act on irrelevant terms with a single click, right inside Google Ads. After the trial, it's $12 per month per user, with no spreadsheets required.