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Negative keyword lists: how to build yours (with a starter list)

Irrelevant searches arrive like rows of Space Invaders: a new wave every week, a little closer each time. One shared list in Google Ads holds up to 5,000 negatives, and you can run 20 of them.

Negative keywords are the cheapest control in paid search. They cost nothing to add, they take effect right away, and they decide what your keywords are not allowed to buy. The catch is that they behave differently from regular keywords, and the differences are exactly where budget leaks.

This guide covers how negative match types work, where each kind of negative should live, how negatives behave next to broad match, Performance Max and AI Max, and a starter list for B2B accounts you can adapt today.

What is a negative keyword list?

A negative keyword list is a named, shared set of negative keywords you build once and apply to many campaigns. Change the list and every campaign using it updates. That beats adding the same 40 job-seeker terms to 12 campaigns by hand and forgetting campaign 13.

In Google Ads, lists live under Tools, then Shared library, then Exclusion lists. You can create up to 20 lists per account, with up to 5,000 negative keywords in each, and apply a list to up to 1,000 campaigns at once.

How do negative keyword match types work?

Negatives use the same three match types as keywords, but they read the query literally. Here's how each one treats the negative free crm:

Those definitions come straight from Google's help center. Two details trip people up:

• No close variants. Google states that negative keywords don't match close variants, so a negative on "career" won't block "careers". The one freebie: Google says negatives now automatically account for misspellings, so you can stop typing out every typo by hand. Plurals, synonyms and rewordings are still on you.
• The 16-word edge. If a search is longer than 16 words and your negative appears after the 16th word, the ad can still show. Rare, but it explains the occasional "how did this get through" moment.

Shared lists, account-level or campaign negatives: which goes where?

Account-level negatives apply to search and shopping inventory across Search, Performance Max, Shopping, App, Smart and Local campaigns. That reach is the reason to keep the list short and boring. Put a term there only if you'd never pay for it in any campaign, ever.

Campaign-level negatives do a different job: traffic routing. If your brand campaign should own brand searches, add your brand as a negative in non-brand campaigns. If a product campaign keeps catching another product's searches, negate across. That's sculpting, and it belongs at the campaign level, not in a shared list.

How do negatives behave with broad match, Performance Max and AI Max?

Broad match

Broad match keywords can match searches related to the meaning of your keyword, not just its words. Negatives still only block what they literally say, give or take misspellings. The wider your positive matching gets, the more variety reaches your search terms, and the more your negative lists need to cover synonyms and phrasing you didn't predict. This is why broad match without a weekly look at the search term report gets expensive.

Performance Max

Performance Max now supports campaign-level negative keywords and lets you select an existing negative keyword list. Account-level negatives also apply. They only affect Search and Shopping inventory, not Display, YouTube or other placements. Search Engine Land reported in March 2025 that the per-campaign PMax cap rose from 100 to 10,000 negatives.

AI Max for Search

AI Max expands which searches a Search campaign can match, using your landing pages and ads as signals. Google states that negative keywords are respected even with AI Max turned on. AI Max adds its own brand controls and URL exclusions on top, which only help if someone sets them. In the search terms report, AI Max matches carry their own "AI Max" match type, which makes them easy to filter when you're hunting for new negatives.

Brands and competitors

For brand names, Google's brand exclusions are often a better tool than negatives. A brand list matches a brand's variants across languages without you typing each one. Use it when you never want to appear on a competitor's or reseller's name. Use negatives when you want to block one specific phrasing and keep the rest.

How do you build a negative keyword list from scratch?

1. Pull 90 days of search terms across all Search and Performance Max campaigns. Sort by cost.
2. Tag each wasteful term with a reason: job seeker, student, free, DIY, existing customer, wrong product, wrong audience. The reasons become your list names.
3. Extract the root word, not the whole query. "marketing automation jobs remote" becomes the broad negative jobs. One root blocks the next 200 variations.
4. Add plurals and synonyms. job, jobs, career, careers, hiring. Negatives won't do it for you.
5. Pick the narrowest match type that still works. Single words that are never relevant go broad. Words that are only bad in combination go phrase. Exact is for blocking one specific query you otherwise want around.
6. Check for conflicts before applying. Make sure no negative blocks one of your own active keywords.
7. Apply the lists to every relevant campaign, including Performance Max.

B2B starter negative keyword list

Treat this as a first draft, not a paste-and-forget. Every term on it is relevant to someone. Check each against your own offer before you add it.

A practical setup is three or four shared lists named after these reasons, plus a short account-level list for true never-terms. Named lists make reviews faster: when a good search gets blocked, you can see which reason blocked it.

Which negative keyword mistakes block good traffic?

• Broad negatives on common words. A broad negative on software to stop "free software" also blocks "payroll software for startups".
• Negating the problem your buyer searches for. Someone searching "how to reduce churn" might be your best prospect. If you exclude it, make sure it's because you have nothing that answers it, not because it doesn't sound like a buyer.
• Lists nobody reviews. Negatives added for a product you no longer sell, or a market you've since entered, quietly block demand.
• Treating negatives as the fix for a page problem. If a relevant search converts badly, the issue may be where it lands, not the search. Sending that ad group to a page that answers the question can beat excluding it.

Where negatives break

Negatives only filter what you can see. Google reports search terms only when they meet its privacy thresholds, so some wasteful queries never show up for you to exclude. Performance Max negatives stop at Search and Shopping inventory. And because they don't follow meaning, negatives will always trail broad matching by a step. That gap is manageable with a weekly review, and the full method sits in the PPC audit and the B2B PPC playbook.

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