Key Takeaways
- What are negative keywords in Google Ads? Negative keywords are the keyword type that stops your ad from being triggered by a specific word or phrase, so you stop paying for clicks that were never going to convert.
- What are negative keywords, in plain terms? They are the exclusion side of keyword targeting. Positive keywords tell the platform who you want to reach; negative keywords tell it who to leave alone.
- What do negative keywords do for your account? They block irrelevant search queries at the account, campaign, or ad group level, protecting your Quality Score and your cost per click.
- Negative keywords examples range from excluding "jobs" and "free" for a B2B service brand, to excluding out-of-area cities for a local service business, to excluding "cracked" or "torrent" for premium software.
- Negative keywords match types are broad, phrase, and exact on Google Ads, and phrase and exact only on Amazon Ads, which has no negative broad match option.
- Negative targeting in Amazon also lets sellers exclude specific competitor ASINs, not just search terms, a control Google Ads does not offer.
- What is negative keywords in SEO? Negative keywords are a paid-search mechanic. Organic ranking algorithms have no equivalent exclusion feature, though SEO teams apply the same intent-mismatch thinking when they prune a target keyword list.
In digital marketing, negative keywords are an essential part of a successful advertising campaign. They refine your target audience, reduce irrelevant clicks, and save your advertising budget. Negative keywords work across Google Ads and Amazon Advertising, and they are a core part of any comprehensive negative keyword strategy.
This article explains negative keywords in depth and how to use them in your digital marketing and search engine optimization strategies.
What Are Negative Keywords in Google Ads?
According to Google Ads Help, a negative keyword is "a type of keyword that prevents your ad from being triggered by a certain word or phrase." Your ads simply are not shown to anyone searching for that phrase, a setup Google calls a negative match.
Negative keywords can be added at both the campaign level and the ad group level. On Google Ads, they can be negative broad match, negative phrase match, or negative exact match. Amazon Ads only supports negative phrase match and negative exact match, with no negative broad match option. The match type determines how closely a shopper's search needs to align with your negative keyword before it blocks the ad.
One distinction is worth understanding early: a keyword is what you bid on, while a search term is what a real person actually types. Negative keywords work at the search-term level, catching mismatches before they spend your budget.
A meaningful update landed in 2024. Per Google Ads Help, negative keywords now "automatically account for casing and misspellings, so you don't need to add those separately." Before this change, an advertiser had to manually list every misspelling of a term to keep it out of the account. Per Google's own 2024 Google Ads Recap, that single fix now excludes all 1.5 million known misspelled variations of a term like "YouTube" with one negative keyword, and the same update surfaced an average of 9% more search terms in the search terms report that had previously been hidden under "Other." You still need to add synonyms and singular or plural forms yourself, since negative keywords still will not match those close variants.
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Negative Keywords Examples by Industry
Abstract concepts become clear once you map them to real business scenarios. Say you run an advertising agency and you are bidding on "advertising agencies" as a broad match keyword, but you do not offer print advertising. Adding "print" as a negative keyword stops your ad from showing to people searching for print advertising agencies. Or say you run a clothing store that does not sell swimwear: adding "swimwear" as a negative keyword keeps your ad off swimwear searches entirely.
Good negative keywords are usually terms that are related to your keywords but signal a different need. The most common categories repeat across nearly every industry:
| Industry | Negative Keywords to Add |
|---|---|
| B2B services | jobs, salary, internship, career, hiring |
| E-commerce | free, cheap, DIY, homemade, tutorial |
| Premium software | open source, cracked, torrent, free download |
| Local services | cities or states outside your service area |
A job seeker searching "marketing agency jobs" and a buyer searching "marketing agency services" type nearly identical queries, but only one is a customer. Excluding that intent mismatch is a foundational step for almost any campaign.
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Negative Keywords Match Types Explained
Negative broad match is the default and the widest net. Exclude the negative broad match keyword "running shoes," and your ad will not show for any search containing both words in any order, including "shoes for running" or "best running shoes for women." It works well for terms you want gone from every variation.
Negative phrase match narrows the scope. Your ad is excluded only when the search contains your terms in the exact sequence you specify, with any number of extra words around them. So a negative phrase match on "running shoes" blocks "cheap running shoes" but not "shoes for running," since the word order does not match.
Negative exact match is the most surgical option. It excludes your ad only when the search matches your term exactly, with no extra words at all. This is useful for a specific, high-volume irrelevant query where a broader exclusion would accidentally block relevant traffic too.
Filtering out irrelevant traffic starts with your search query data. Pull the search terms report in Google Ads or Amazon Ads and look for queries triggering your ad with a low conversion rate or mismatched intent. Ad showing up for "used" or "second-hand" on a new-product campaign is a strong negative keyword candidate.
A few numeric limits are worth knowing before you build a list. Per Google Ads Help, account-level negative keyword lists cap at 1,000 terms, and Display and Video campaigns consider a maximum of 1,000 negative keywords as well. And per Google Ads Help, a negative keyword only blocks a search if it falls within the first 16 words of the query, so an exclusion sitting past word 16 in an unusually long search will not stop the ad.
Negative Targeting in Amazon Ads
Using negative keywords effectively means building a list and applying it at the right level. This list should include terms irrelevant to your products, terms that drove clicks without conversions, and terms that underperformed against your other keywords.
Google Ads: Account and Campaign-Level Control
Google Ads structures exclusions at two levels. Shared negative keyword lists push one set of exclusions across every campaign, while campaign- and ad-group-level negatives give surgical control over a single area. A well-organized account blocks irrelevant traffic everywhere without redundant manual work.
Amazon Ads: Keyword and Product-Level Control
Amazon Ads takes a different angle. Sellers can exclude specific search terms with negative phrase or negative exact match, and they can also add a negative product target to exclude an individual competitor ASIN from a Sponsored Products campaign. That product-level exclusion has no Google Ads equivalent: it keeps your ad off a competitor's product page entirely, away from browsers who were never going to buy from you.
| Feature | Google Ads | Amazon Ads |
|---|---|---|
| Match types available | Broad, phrase, exact | Phrase, exact only |
| Product-level exclusion | Not available | Negative ASIN targeting |
| Control levels | Account, campaign, ad group | Campaign, ad group |
| Misspelling handling | Automatic since 2024 | Manual |
Both platforms share the same underlying logic: exclude the traffic that looks close to your target but carries the wrong intent.
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Negative Keywords with AI
Artificial Intelligence (AI) can automate and enhance how you identify and implement negative keywords. AI can analyze large volumes of search query data, spot patterns, and surface potential negative keywords based on their likelihood of producing irrelevant clicks or weak conversions.
Tools like WordStream's free Negative Keyword Tool and Kparser flag candidate negative keywords from your search term report and monitor performance over time, which matters most on large-scale accounts where manual review turns slow and error-prone.
Types of Keywords: From Positive to Negative
In PPC advertising, there are two directions of keyword targeting: positive keywords are the terms you want to win, and negative keywords are the terms you want to exclude. Layered on top are the match types, broad, phrase, and exact, that determine how closely a search has to align with your keyword before your ad shows.
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Negative Keywords Beyond Paid Search
What Is Negative Keywords in SEO?
Negative keywords are a Google Ads and Amazon Ads mechanic, not a ranking factor inside an organic search algorithm. Organic algorithms rank pages on relevance and authority signals; there is no exclusion list you can submit to Google Search to keep a page from ranking for a term. Anyone searching "what is negative keywords in SEO" is really asking whether the PPC concept transfers to organic work, and the honest answer is that the mechanism does not exist there.
Applying the Same Exclusion Logic to Organic Content
What does transfer is the thinking behind it. SEO teams apply the same intent-mismatch discipline when they prune a target keyword list: cutting terms that draw the wrong searcher and targeting content at buyers instead of job seekers or researchers. Negative keywords protect a paid budget one search term at a time; SEO exclusion decisions protect an entire content strategy the same way.
Negative keywords are a powerful tool in any digital marketer's arsenal. Understanding them, how they work, and how to use them, lowers your ad spend and raises your conversion rate, whether you run Google Ads, Amazon Ads, or another PPC platform.
Ready to optimize your PPC campaigns and drive better results? Partner with Twelverays. Our paid search team builds negative keyword strategy into every account we manage, so your budget goes toward buyers, not browsers. Schedule a discovery call today.
