Negative keywords: the list that decides whether your budget buys customers or curiosity

A negative keyword stops your ad from showing for any search that contains it, and a well-kept negative list is worth more to most accounts than any bid change: on the accounts we audit, between a fifth and a third of the spend goes to searches that could never have bought. The list is built once from the sector, then grown every week from the Search Terms report, and it never stops growing. Our free generator produces the first version in a minute.

How a negative keyword matches

Negatives use the same three match types as keywords, but they behave differently: a negative does not expand to close variants the way a positive keyword does. Negative broad match blocks any search containing all of the words in any order; negative phrase blocks searches containing the words in that order; negative exact blocks only that exact search. Since late 2024 Google has said negatives also block misspellings, but they still do not block plurals, synonyms or other variations, so "job" does not block "jobs" and both need adding.

Where negatives live

A negative can sit on an ad group, a campaign, a shared list applied to several campaigns, or at account level, which Google added in 2023 and which is the right home for the words that should never appear anywhere. Shared lists are how we run it: one list per theme, jobs and training, information, free and cheap, places, the products we do not stock, applied to every Search and Shopping campaign, so a new campaign inherits the whole history on the day it is created. Performance Max is the exception: it takes brand exclusions and, since 2024, campaign-level negatives, but it does not take shared lists, so its exclusions are set separately and checked separately.

The seed list every account starts with

Before the first click, an account should already exclude the searches every sector attracts. Employment: job, jobs, vacancy, vacancies, salary, hiring, recruitment, apprenticeship, career. Education: course, courses, training, qualification, certificate, degree, university, college. Information: what is, how to, meaning, definition, wiki, diy, tutorial, manual, instructions. Price hunting: free, cheap, cheapest, second hand, used, refurbished, for sale by owner. Then the sector's own: for a heating engineer, error codes and manuals; for a solicitor, template and sample; for a shop, the brands and models it does not sell.

We built a free generator that produces this list for a named sector, grouped by theme and ready to paste into a shared list. It is the first thing we run on every new account, and it costs nothing to run on yours: open the negative keyword generator on Competitor Watch.

The weekly routine that grows it

1. Open the Search Terms report for the last seven days and sort by cost.
2. Read every row that spent money and did not convert, and ask one question of each: could this person have bought from us? If not, decide the word or phrase that gives it away.
3. Add that word at the widest match type that will not block a wanted search. "apprenticeship" goes in at broad; "cheap" might need phrase if you sell a cheap range.
4. Put it in the right shared list, so every campaign inherits it and the next new campaign starts with it.
5. Read the rows that did convert too. A search that converted in the wrong ad group is a new keyword or a new page, not a negative.
6. Once a month, read the negative lists themselves and remove anything that has started blocking a search you want. Businesses change; a firm that begins selling refurbished stock needs "refurbished" out of the list the same week.

Shopping campaigns need it more, not less

Shopping ads are matched from the product feed, not from keywords, so the only targeting control you have at search level is the negative list. A Shopping account with no negatives shows the same product for a spare part search, a manual search, a used search and a competitor's model number, and pays for all of them. The same weekly read applies, with the same shared lists, plus a list of the brands and part numbers you do not carry.

The mistakes that cost more than no list at all

• A negative that blocks a money term. "repair" added at broad by someone who only sells new boilers blocks "boiler repair or replace", which was the best search in the account. Read the impact before saving; Google shows conflicts for keywords in the same campaign, but not across shared lists.
• Phrase negatives that are too short. "free" at phrase match blocks "free quote", which every service business wants. It needs to be "for free", "free download", "free trial" and so on, or the word at exact.
• Forgetting the new campaign. A campaign created without the shared lists applied runs for a month on searches the account excluded a year ago.
• Never removing anything. A list built for a business that has since changed is a list that blocks its new customers.
• Excluding competitors' names by reflex. Sometimes a search for a competitor is a buyer comparing, and your ad next to their name is the cheapest introduction you will get. Read the conversion column before deciding.

A negative list is the account's memory. Every wasted click that gets excluded is a click the account will never pay for again, which is why an account read weekly for a year is cheaper to run than the same account started fresh.