Negative Keywords in Google Ads: A Practical Guide for India

How negative keywords work in Google Ads: match types, shared lists, Performance Max rules and limits, plus a starter list for Indian businesses.

Published 18 June 2026 by Web Hippo in Paid Ads

Negative keywords are the words you tell Google Ads to keep your ads away from. A Kukatpally dental clinic bidding on "dental implants" doesn't want to pay for clicks from "dental implant course" or "dental assistant jobs", and those searches are common in India. Every rupee spent on them is a rupee your real patients never see.

This guide explains how negative keywords in Google Ads actually match (they behave differently from normal keywords), where to add them, the current limits, what changed for Performance Max, and the mistakes that quietly block good traffic. It ends with a starter negative keyword list for common Indian business types and a 10-minute weekly routine you can run yourself.

What Are Negative Keywords in Google Ads?

A negative keyword is a word or phrase that stops your ad from being eligible when it appears in someone's search. Your normal (positive) keywords decide which searches you enter the auction for. Negatives remove the searches you never want, even when a positive keyword would otherwise match them.

Google's own example is an optometrist who sells eyeglasses and adds "wine glasses" and "drinking glasses" as negatives (About negative keywords, Google Ads Help). The Indian version looks like this: a Pune D2C skincare brand bidding on "vitamin c serum" will also be matched to "vitamin c serum DIY at home" and "vitamin c serum manufacturer", unless it excludes "diy", "at home" and "manufacturer".

Why this matters more now: Google leans heavily on broad match and automated campaigns, which find more searches for you. Some of those searches are gold. Plenty are not. Negatives are one of the few direct levers you still have over where the money goes.

Negative Keyword Match Types: How They Really Work

Search campaigns support three negative keyword match types. You set them with the same symbols as positive keywords: nothing for broad, "quotes" for phrase and [square brackets] for exact.

Negative broad match (the default): your ad won't show if the search contains all the negative terms, in any order. It can still show if only some of the terms appear.
Negative phrase match: your ad won't show if the search contains the terms in the same order, even with other words before or after.
Negative exact match: your ad won't show only when the search is exactly those terms, in that order, with no extra words.

Look at the last row. That is the part most advertisers get wrong.

Negatives don't expand to close variants

Positive keywords match close variants: plurals, stems, abbreviations and words with the same meaning. Negative keywords do not. Google states that negatives "won't match to close variants or other expansions" and that you'll need to add synonyms and singular or plural versions yourself. Its example: excluding "flowers" blocks "red flowers" but not "red flower".

So "job" does not block "jobs", and neither blocks "vacancy", "hiring" or "naukri". Google says casing and misspellings are handled automatically, but in practice we still check the search terms report for Hinglish and transliterated spellings, because Indian searchers mix scripts and languages freely.

Small rules worth knowing

Symbols: ampersands and accents make a different negative ("socks & shoes" is not "socks and shoes"). Periods are ignored, and a minus sign in front of a word causes that word to be ignored.
Very long searches: if your negative keyword appears after the 16th word of a search, your ad can still show.
Display and Video campaigns treat every negative as broad match and consider a maximum of 1,000, and Google says they are less precise there, so ads may occasionally appear near excluded terms.

Where to Add Negatives: Account, Campaign, Ad Group or Shared List

You can add negatives at four places, and choosing the right one saves a lot of maintenance. The limits below come from Google's guide to adding negative keywords and its account limits page.

Our rule of thumb: put pure junk intent at the account level or in a shared list, put business logic ("we don't serve Secunderabad", "we don't sell refurbished") at campaign level, and use ad group negatives only to stop two of your own ad groups competing. For example, add [root canal] as an exact negative in a "General dentist" ad group so that search goes to the dedicated root canal ad group with its own ad and landing page.

How to Add Negative Keywords, Step by Step

From the negative keywords tab

In Google Ads, open Campaigns, then Audiences, keywords and content, then Search keywords.
Go to the Negative search keywords tab and click the plus button.
Choose whether to add them to a campaign or an ad group, then pick it.
Enter one keyword per line, using "quotes" for phrase match and [brackets] for exact. Anything without symbols is broad.
Optionally tick Save to new or existing list so the same negatives can be reused on other campaigns, then save.

Account-level negatives live separately, under the account settings, and shared lists sit in Tools > Shared library > Exclusion lists. Google's interface moves menus around from time to time, so if a label differs, search for "negative keywords" in the Google Ads search bar.

From the search terms report

The better source of negatives is the search terms report, which lists the actual searches that triggered your ads. Go to Campaigns > Insights and reports > Search terms, tick the irrelevant terms and add them as negatives. Don't always add the full search term: often one word does the job. If "dental assistant jobs in kukatpally" appears, the useful negative is usually jobs as broad match, not the whole phrase.

Two limits of the report to keep in mind. Google hides low-volume searches for privacy, so you never see every term. And the report is only as good as your conversion tracking: if conversions aren't recorded properly, you can't tell a junk term from a good one. Fix conversion and attribution tracking first if you have any doubt.

Negatives are also worth adding before launch, not just after. When you do your keyword research, note the irrelevant patterns you see in Keyword Planner ideas and Google's own suggestions, and start with those in place.

Negative Keywords in Performance Max

Performance Max (PMax) used to be close to a black box on negatives. That changed in 2025, when Google made campaign-level negatives available to all advertisers in the interface and raised the limit. As of September 2026, Google's Performance Max help page confirms the following:

Campaign-level negatives: you can add them to a specific PMax campaign from the Negative keywords tab, or apply an existing negative keyword list. The per-campaign limit is 10,000, the same as Search.
Account-level negatives automatically apply to all Search and Shopping inventory, including PMax.
They only cover Search and Shopping. PMax negatives do not stop your ads on YouTube, Display, Gmail or Discover placements. For those, use content exclusions and placement exclusions.
Impact estimates: Google can show predicted performance before you add negatives to a PMax campaign, which is useful for spotting a negative that would cut too deep.

The biggest PMax negative in most Indian accounts is still your own brand name, because PMax likes to claim branded searches you would have won cheaply through Search. Our Performance Max guide covers brand traffic and how to run PMax alongside Search, so we won't repeat it here.

Starter Negative Keyword List for Indian Businesses

Use this as a starting point, not a copy-paste list. Every term below is a candidate: check it against your own search terms and conversions before adding. The right-hand column is where businesses most often hurt themselves.

Competitor brands. Broad match regularly matches your ads to competitor names. If you are not deliberately bidding on competitors, add their brand names to a "Competitors" shared list. If you are, keep them in a separate campaign where you can judge the cost properly, and exclude them everywhere else.

"Near me" and locations. "Near me" is high intent for anything local. It is only a negative when you can't serve the searcher, for example an online-only brand, or a Gachibowli clinic that keeps getting "near me" clicks from people in other cities (fix location targeting first, then use negatives for city names you don't serve).

A 10-Minute Weekly Search Terms Routine

The accounts that stay clean are not the ones with the longest negative list. They are the ones someone looks at every week. Here is the routine we suggest for small and mid-sized accounts:

Once a month, spend another ten minutes checking that no negative blocks one of your own keywords (see the next section), and read the list for words that no longer apply, such as a service you have since started offering.

Common Negative Keyword Mistakes

1. Blocking terms that convert

This is the most expensive mistake because it is invisible: you never see the searches you excluded. A coaching institute adds "free" and loses every "free demo class" search. A SaaS company adds "free" and blocks "free trial". A D2C brand adds "price" to cut window shoppers and blocks "vitamin c serum price", one of its best buying searches. Always check conversions before excluding a single word.

2. Negatives that conflict with your keywords

Google warns that negatives overlapping your regular keywords will stop your ads showing. This usually happens with shared lists: someone adds "cheap" to an account-wide list, and the campaign bidding on "cheap flights to goa" goes quiet. Before adding a single-word broad negative to a shared list, search your keywords for that word.

3. Assuming one version covers all variants

Because negatives don't match close variants, "course" leaves "courses" open and "job" leaves "jobs" open. Add both, plus the Hindi or regional words people actually type, such as "naukri" or "kaise".

4. Using exact match when you meant broad

Adding [dental assistant jobs] as an exact negative blocks only that exact search. Tomorrow's "dental assistant jobs hyderabad" gets through. For junk intent, a single broad word ("jobs") is usually the right tool. Save exact match for routing between your own ad groups, where you want surgical precision.

5. Expecting PMax negatives to control video and display

Performance Max negatives cover Search and Shopping only. If your PMax ads appear on irrelevant YouTube videos or apps, negatives won't help. Use placement and content exclusions instead.

6. Set and forget

Search behaviour shifts with seasons, news and exam calendars. An education client might want "result" blocked most of the year and not during results week, when some parents start looking for coaching. A list built once in 2024 won't fit a 2026 account.

If you would rather hand over the search terms work, our Google Ads management team runs this routine for businesses across India and shares every negative we add, with the reason.

Frequently Asked Questions

Last checked September 2026. Limits and Performance Max rules are from Google Ads Help and can change; the starter list is a practitioner recommendation, not an official Google list.