Google Ads Negative Keywords: The RIGHT Way to Find and Add Negatives in 2026

In this video, I am going to show you how to add negative keywords the right way. Now I'm going to share the old school manual way of doing it, which I've had to do a million times in my career, and I think it's important you understand how to do that. So watch that part first. Then at the end, I'm gonna share how to use tools like Claude to automate it all, right? So I'm gonna share how to do it the automated way, but also how to manually do it. I think you need to understand how to manually do it first so you understand the logic. Don't be a lazy AI user where you just are blindly trusting AI tools to just do all of this for you and you have no idea what it's actually doing. So I think you need to understand the logic. I'm gonna share how we find negatives, why we're adding negatives the way we're adding them, and that way you understand all the logic behind it, and then I'll share how you can just automate all that too. Let's dive in. Okay, real quick, what the heck is a negative keyword? So with keywords, you're targeting terms that you want to show your ads on. A negative keyword is simply a term you do not want to show your ad on. So there can be lots of different negatives. I will even share a complete organization way of adding negatives themed out. But it could be as simple as terms that you wouldn't show for, like the word used. If you sell brand new products, you would have nothing like used, out of area terms, informational terms, support terms, people looking up for like customer support for your business. And you're like, I really don't wanna show an ad to someone who's like trying to just contact my customer service department. So there's like an infinite way of finding negative keywords, but simply put, you don't wanna pay big fat greedy Google money for a click on a search that is either irrelevant or wouldn't make sense from an advertising new customer acquisition standpoint to show your ad on. So you can add these negative keywords to your account so it prevents Google from firing your ads on those types of search terms. Now, inside of your Google Ads account, You simply can go to the search terms under insights and reports. This will actually show you what your ad fired on for actual searches people made with the campaigns that your campaigns and keywords and ad groups and everything that you're actually like bidding on within the account. More than likely, because this just continues to happen no matter what, it doesn't matter. What account we manage, there's infinite negatives that have to be added, usually since Google's very good at showing ads to a lot of broad or irrelevant stuff that you wouldn't quite want. Sometimes it's fine. In most cases though, you do want to add negative keywords to prevent wasted ad spend. But just go to your search terms. You can do a quick browse and, and you're immediately probably going to find things you're like, wow, that's not something that we would want to show for. Or maybe it's an underperforming search term. If you look at the cost and clicks, it's not converting. So it's just performance is quite bad. But a lot of times what you're looking for is just very irrelevant, in-your-face searches that you wouldn't want to show your ads for. That could even be stuff like competitor terms and whatnot. So the first manual grunt work of adding negative keywords is literally going in building a new sheet. And you just simply would go in and you just go one by one in the account and you find search terms. So here it's like, oh, okay, Lovesac, which would be a competitor. I'll just make a competitor column. And then I know I didn't spell that right, but just ignore that. I'll make a competitor column and then I'll just go add that. And here's Value City Furniture. That's a competitor too. So we'll add That is a negative keyword too. I don't want to show my ads on competitors right now, so I'm just going to go group a list of those here. Let's say I didn't have like a U-shaped sectional. I may just add this. So this would be sort of what I would call universal. I'm doing a real good job of spelling everything today. So here we'll do that, add that in there. And I know that's still misspelled, folks, but I'm moving quickly. And then we'll do like living room exact. I don't want— and I'll show you how, I'll show you how to add, like, obviously the word living room is something that in a certain phrase I would want to show for. So someone like sectionals for my living room, okay, we would want to show an ad for that for our sectional service or sectional sofa business. But just the exact search living room, I wouldn't. So I'm going to share how you would add living room as a negative keyword where you only are negating the term living room, the exact search term of that, and not something where someone's looking up like, you know, buy a sectional sofa for my living room, which you would want to show an ad for. So anyways, this is the manual way. You just go through, you add them to a sheet, and you kind of manually review and do this. This takes time if you're doing a big account. If you're a small account, small spender, you actually could pretty much do this just like this and be totally fine to maybe spend, you know, 5, 10 minutes doing it once a week, and, and that's it. Big accounts, or if you're running multiple accounts, that is a horrible way of living. So I'm going to show you better tools of doing this. Real quick, I have two offers. One, if you run Google Ads right now and you're spending money and you have an agency running it, a freelancer, maybe you're running it yourself, go get a free audit from my team. If you qualify, we will give you practical advice on how to improve your account. So a link will be in the description below to go, just go fill out a quick form. Takes a few minutes to schedule a call and then my team will literally get in the account and show you exactly where you can make more money or where you're wasting money. Practical advice, I promise. If you are learning Google Ads, let's say you're a freelancer, you work at an agency, or you just want to continue to run your Google Ads account yourself, then I would love for you to go join PPC Copilot. It is our school group. I have my courses and trainings in there. I do Q&As. I have resources like scripts, and Claude skills like you're learning, uh, in this video. All of that will be available inside PPC Copilot. So go join that group if you want to continue to upskill your Google Ads knowledge. I would love to see you inside. All right, back to the video. Okay, the first tool to use would be a script. And I have a negative keyword script here. This is something that we have in our school group, PPC Copilot. If you want to learn more about that, there'll be a link to that group in the description below. Below of this video. But we have a script for the group. And what you do is you just go to Tools, you go to Bulk Actions, you go to Scripts, and this will actually pull data from your account straight into a Google Sheet. And this runs fairly quickly, and it's able to analyze a bunch of data fast. So I ran the script, it, it like in a minute. And for the last 30 days of data for this account, it was able to analyze 8,000 thousand terms. And this is an Ngram script. So what an Ngram script does is it breaks everything down to a 1-gram, a 2-gram, 3-gram, or 4-gram. So that's like basically root words. So it's showing, hey, the word washable had 382 search terms that used it. Now it's a total cost of $5,600, but it only generated $1,700 in sales. That looks pretty horrible right now. In this case, I'm actually gonna keep it, but this is just showing the root words that are really bad. Again, the word— let's, for example, take the word used. Let's say if you were looking through your search term report, you see used show up in like 6 different searches. You don't want to go and need to add every unique phrasing of how people are searching with the word used. You just want I don't ever want to show an ad for the word used. So this is what an Ngram analysis does a good job of finding, is like those negative root words. And it breaks it down by 1-gram, 2-gram, 3-gram, 4-gram. So this is a script that can be used. If you do a quick Google search, there are free ones out there. I believe this one that I have in this account is hosted in our school group, and I have like a full tutorial on like how to add it correctly and everything. But it's a very nice tool to run and it's not too hard once you get it set up to do. And it's— you can analyze large groups of search terms at the gram level to really pinpoint those root terms that are bleeding money for you. Okay, now getting into the fun stuff, utilizing AI. You can now build prompts or skills that can do negative keywords for you. So this is a full negative keyword skill that we built here at Grow My Ads. Again, this is gonna be shared within our PPC Copilot community. There's a full training and tutorial on how to use this skill, but basically this skill lives inside Claude, and when we then throw search terms inside Claude, it will run this complete skill, or basically think of it as like an SOP for Claude, and then Claude runs all the search terms. All I did in this case was dump a CSV file of search terms. I didn't do anything else. I just downloaded my search terms from my Google Ads account into a CSV file, and then that kind of looks like this, right? And then I just dumped that CSV file straight into Claude where it automatically ran my negative keyword skill for me. It knew what to do, and then boom, here was my output. So It was able to summarize everything that it did. It found top negatives by the root terms, and then it's also given me like, hey, flagged terms where it didn't know how to group them, edge cases where it's kind of like these are ambiguous. And then it's also shown me terms where it's grouping by universal negative keyword list. This would mean— and I'll share how to add this here in a second, but This is saying, hey, these are searches that should be applied to all campaigns within your account for Home Reserve, which sells sectional sofas. Competitor terms. Here's all the competitors that it found. So if I don't want to run ads on competitors right now, boom, I can just simply add all of these competitor terms to a competitor list. Out of area. So this is like, we only sell in United States and this is showing Canada. So obviously, okay, I should probably go add Canada as a negative keyword. Support and repair terms. These, this, This would be like customer support and stuff like that. And then informational, if you don't want to show for informational, as well as wrong products. So here are things like we don't have leather and this term, it found leather for us. So that is an entire automated way of utilizing Claude and, you know, AI technology to pretty much run through all of this. Now we built this skill, it's built based off of all of our training. And so this wasn't something that we just said, Claude, do negative keywords. But if you don't want to go to this level, you literally could probably just dump a CSV file into Claude and just say, hey, can you find negative keywords for you? And it will still do a pretty good job. Now, it's not going to give you, you know, this output that I have here where it's nice and organized with data, but you can still get a pretty good negative keyword list just by literally typing like, you know, a monkey to it and just saying, do negatives for me. Here's a CSV file of all my search terms. Now you can also go to the ultimate nerd level and you can use Claude Code. And so this is my Claude Code account. I have a direct API integration to all of my Google Ads accounts and I have a negative keyword skill built in then to Claude Code. And all I literally did, I didn't have to give it a CSV file or anything. I just said, run, and I didn't even do that correct. I said run negative, run negatives for Built Best, which is one of my client accounts that we manage for Monday through Thursday this week. That's all I did. And boom, it went ahead and it literally ran the script for me. And then that took like almost no time to do, by the way. And then boom, opened up the sheet that it built and it built literally what I just kind of showed you guys. So it built basically this Home Reserve list that I showed you earlier, the more robust one. I just, I ran it only for a few days. There wasn't a ton of data there, but with Claude Code, I was able to generate this exact output within like almost no time. And I don't even need to do like a CSV file. I'm like just talking to Claude Code and it runs. You can schedule that to run automatically and you know, that way you don't even have to think about it. So there's a lot of power you can use with Claude Code in order to do negative keywords. Okay, so you've got all of these negatives, whether you manually went and found them, you used a Google Ads script, or you used the power of AI utilizing like Claude Skills or Claude Code. So how do you actually add them, or how should you add them to, to be the most efficient and effective with negative keywords in your account? So What you want to do, and I've got this quick like Google support doc, I, there's a few ways. Just like there's match types for keywords that you want to target, there's also match types for negative keywords. So you can add them as broad. So here's negative broad match keyword running shoes. That's just straight up. If you just added the word running shoes in, this will negate any search that contains both running and shoes in it. So, the word blue running shoes would be negated, shoes running would be negated, and then obviously running shoes, right? Now it's, it's, it's very precise. It won't do running shoe. So this is the singular version. It won't, it won't negate that. So you would literally have to add running shoes plus running shoe if you didn't want to show up for all of that. There's also phrase match. So phrase match is going to, you know, only negate terms with that phrase. So here we have running shoes phrase match and running shoes, blue running shoes would be negated because it does have the exact phrase of running shoes in that search term. However, shoes running would actually show in this case. So it's a bit more controlled. It's a bit of a tighter negative match type to be used. Versus broad, which is just looking at the words themselves. So it just has to basically, if the search term just has running and shoes in it, it's gonna negate it. But it has to have the phrase running shoes if you're using phrase match, hence the name. Then there's exact. And unlike the exact match for a positive keyword, which goes and adds a bunch of search terms for your ads or shows your ads for search terms that are quite broad, exact match negatives are actually literal. And so that means if I have the brackets around my term, this means exact match. It exactly is negating running shoes. So in that example, living room that I showed you earlier, I don't want to negate all living room searches, right? But the word living room I would want to negate. So then that's where you would add it as an exact match negative keyword, and you only negate that exact search, living room, or in this case, running shoes. Maybe it's too broad, the performance is bad, but you don't want to negate all running shoes. So there are these match types. You need to understand how they work before you would want to go add negative keywords. Now I would go through then my list of terms, and I'm just going to use a simple one today, competitors. So I'm just going to copy these competitors. Now it is adding all of them as phrase match automatically because that's how I develop my skill. I use phrase phrase match for the most part when I add negative keywords. I don't do a lot of broad match. For the most part, it's, it's a lot of phrase. Now, words like lovesack or IKEA, it's grouping them as phrase. Whether it's phrase or broad, it's going to operate the same because it's literally one word. So it doesn't really matter. But in this case, I'm going to copy my negative keywords. Now I'm going to go into the account. Now inside of the account, I'm going to my campaigns and then I go to keywords and then you go over to negative keywords. Now you can do this at campaign levels, right? Or you can do it at the account level. In this case, I'm just going to go to the campaign. So here's our shopping campaign. I'm going to go to keywords, which shopping— shopping doesn't even use keywords, right? But you can still add negative keywords. And then here you can either add at the campaign level or you can add a list. So right now you can see in this account there's campaign-level negative keywords already added. Here we have recliner as phrase match negative. We have furniture exact match negative. So you can see the different variations here. And then like, here's brand terms. This is a negative keyword list. Lists are very nice to use because you can just apply them to multiple campaigns and you don't have to go copy and paste a bunch of negatives and then move them over to those campaigns. So I always recommend utilizing lists when you can, and then only add campaign negative keywords when it's super specific to just that campaign. So when you add them, make sure you add them to lists. And again, like this skill that we developed, our auto groups them in a lot of the core lists that we use. So like wrong product, informational, support and repair, out of area, yada yada. So this one would be a competitor list. Now I'm in the account. All I do is hit this blue button here and then I'm going to paste it right here in this negative keyword area. Now, in this case, I don't have a competitor list yet. So what do I do? Well, I don't want to just add it to the campaign. If I hit save, all this would do is add these keywords to the campaign. But what I can do is just hit save to a new or existing list. And here I'm just going to create a new one and I'm going to call it competitor. And so this is now my competitor negative list. And so here I'm going to hit save and boom, there's the competitor list. So if I click this list, it now has all of these negative keywords added to them. And so if I wanted to go to a new campaign, so let's say I go to one of the search campaigns here, go to negatives, I can now literally just hit add negative keywords and then I go over to use negative keyword list and then find this competitor list. I'm gonna hit that, boom, hit save, bam. Now I have my competitor negatives added to that campaign. So you can do that for all different themes of negative keyword lists that you add. It's super easy. It also allows you to efficiently look at negatives that you've already added versus just like I've been in campaigns that I've audited. They've just got like thousands of keyword negative keywords added at the campaign level. It's a mess to siphon through. And so what I do obviously today is just dump it into a CSV, upload to Claude, let it kind of siphon through it for me. But when you have a nice clean structure to an account and you're using clean negative keyword list, it is very organized and easy to then manage, especially if you want to go review like, what did we add? Is there any negatives we would want to remove possibly? Let's say you actually want to go show ads on competitor terms now for a specific reason. You could easily go find the competitor negative keyword list and remove it. So there's lots of reasonings behind using the lists, but it will save you a tremendous amount of time and headache in the future. I promise you that. Now, one thing you must absolutely always do, whether you're manually adding negative keywords or utilizing tools or skills or scripts or whatever, is you have to think, is this negative keyword going to negatively impact me if I add it? And I've seen this happen too many times. So for example, the word RV in this case is saying, hey, you should add RV as a negative. It's a wrong product. And this was with the skill. That is correct based off the context that Claude has on this business. However, the reality is there are a lot of RV owners that will buy furniture from Home Reserve because it's modular sectional units, so they can actually build very like small little sofas by piecing them together. And so RV owners are an avatar that actually purchase from Home Reserve. So if I just blindly added RV as a negative keyword, that would kill off sales that I was generating from people who own RVs and are searching for RV, you know, sectional sofas or couches. The one I've seen happen a lot too is people who add terms like, think of like out of area, they've added state abbreviations. So think of like where I'm from, Indiana. People go in and add that, or like, or Oregon, right? So OR, what are you actually, you're, you're like, you're negating basically the word in or, or that could potentially kill search terms that would be good in nature and in intent. But you're, you were just thinking state abbreviations in the moment of adding it. So always think, are there any searches that this would kill that I would want before you actually go add that negative keyword. That's why I said you need to understand the logic behind negative keywords before you just go use AI tools and scripts and just try to automate it completely. Because I have seen AI, I have seen tools absolutely wreck accounts because it added negative keywords on accident that killed off high-performing search terms. So, always double-check the negative keywords that you have on your list before you add them into the account and enable them and prevent, you know, actual negative performance from adding negative keywords. There you go. You now know everything you need to know about negative keywords. I hope you got great value from that. Listen, two offers. One, if you're running ads now and you have someone else managing it, or maybe you're managing it yourself and you're like, I would like a third person view into our account of experts to see what we're doing maybe incorrectly, or how could we grow, go get a free audit from my team. If you qualify, the link to go get that audit will be in the description below. My team will literally go in, review your account, and give you recommendations, practical recommendations. You can give it to your team to use or other agency, freelancer, whatever. We actually don't care. Obviously a lot of people will hire us from it, so that's good for us if you do. But it's a practical audit. It's not fluff, it's not automated. It's humans reviewing your account and giving you practical advice on improving the performance of your Google Ads account. So go get that free audit if you're looking to improve your Google Ads performance. If you're running stuff yourself or you work for an agency or you're a freelancer yourself and you're like, hey, I want to continue to upskill or maybe you want the scripts and Claude skills I showed you today on negative keywords, I would love to see you inside a group called PPC Copilot. I do Q&As in there, ongoing trainings, lots of resources like scripts and Claude skills. So go upskill. If you're running Google Ads and learning more and you want to continue to upskill, I would love to see you inside PPC Copilot. The link to that group would be in the description below. And if you want nothing to do with either of those offers, that's cool too. I'll see you on the next video.