Negative keywords are terms you exclude from search campaigns so your ads don't serve on irrelevant or unprofitable queries — the pruning that keeps broad matching honest.
Definition
Negatives block matching at the keyword, ad group, campaign, or shared-list level. In the broad-match-plus-Smart-Bidding era they're the primary steering control left in search: match types loosened, so exclusions carry the precision. The work is continuous — reviewing search term reports, spotting waste patterns, and excluding them before they compound.
Why it matters
Query waste is a leak, not a flood: individually small irrelevant matches that sum to real budget over months. Accounts with disciplined negative hygiene consistently run cheaper CPAs on identical keyword sets — the difference is purely what they refused to pay for.
In agentic execution
Search term review is the canonical example of work that decays when humans get busy. Adlyse's agents execute exclusions continuously — each proposed with the offending queries as evidence, approved by a human, logged.
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