How to find negative keywords in Google Ads

Negative keywords are the queries you pay to avoid. A Search campaign matches more than the keywords you added. Close variants, broad match, and Performance Max search terms all send you queries you never wrote down. The search terms report is where that extra demand shows up, with clicks and cost attached.

Start from the report, not a generic list

A starter list (jobs, free, DIY, login) is useful on day one. It is not a substitute for your account. Export the search terms report for the last 7 to 14 days, sorted by cost. Read the terms that spent money and did not convert before you read the long tail of one-click curiosities.

Keep three piles:

• Junk. The query is about something else: jobs, a different product, a navigational lookup, piracy.
• Low intent. The topic is adjacent, but the person is not ready to buy: free, cheap, reviews, how-to, training. Whether this pile is worth blocking depends on what you sell. A course business should not block “course”.
• Keep. Commercial language, your brand, location, or anything that already converted. When you are unsure, keep it and look again next week.

Use match types on purpose

Add the whole query as a phrase negative when the wasted term is several words. That blocks that phrase without blocking every word inside it. Use exact match for a single ambiguous word, and only after you have checked that the word does not sit inside a converting query.

Before you add anything, ask whether the negative would also block a keyword you are bidding on or a search term that converted. Phrase “dental implants” blocks “dental implants austin”. Phrase “free dental implants” does not.

Make it a Monday habit

The report changes every week. A one-time cleanup decays. The workable version is short: sort by cost, mark the obvious waste, add those negatives to a shared list, and do not re-litigate the terms you already rejected. Shared lists beat ad-group negatives for this job because the same junk query usually appears in more than one campaign.

JunkTerms is that routine with the spreadsheet removed. The script pulls seven days of search terms, the review page is the three piles, and only the approved rows are written to a shared list named JunkTerms.