Marketing & GrowthFree
Search Term and Negative Keyword Review
Search terms clustered by intent with a keep, negate or move call on each, and the exclusions written where they will actually apply.
River's search term review reads the report and groups the terms by the intent behind them. Job seekers, free-and-DIY, competitor names, wrong geography, wrong product tier: each becomes one cluster carrying its combined spend, its conversions and a single call. Keep it, negate it, or move it to its own exact-match group. The exclusion list comes back written at the level it belongs to, in the match types Google actually honours, with the plural forms it will not infer for you.
What ranks here is a guide to reading the report, or an n-gram script that counts word frequency across your terms. Both stop at the same place: an alphabetical list of words to exclude. A list of words is not a negative keyword list. A negative keyword is a string plus a match type plus a level, and getting any of those three wrong makes it do nothing or take a working campaign down with it.
Built for the performance marketer running the account weekly, the agency taking over one with no negatives at all, and anyone who has just seen what a broad match keyword did to a quarter. Pair it with the Google Ads account audit when you want the whole account priced, and report the result in the cross-platform paid report alongside Meta and LinkedIn. It runs in the marketing workspace, so next month's report lands against the same clusters.
Four rules in Google's own documentation that break a naive list
The first rule undoes most lists on contact. Google states that negative keywords do not match to close variants and gives its own example: exclude the negative broad keyword flowers and an ad will not serve on red flowers, but it will still serve on red flower. Singulars, plurals and synonyms all need adding by hand. Casing and misspellings are the exception; those are handled for you, so adding them is wasted rows.
The second is a footgun sitting in your own data. Paste a term with a hyphen in it and Google's rule is that a minus at the front of a word makes that word ignored, so the negative keyword dark -chocolate is treated as just dark. Anyone excluding a hyphenated product name has quietly excluded half of it. Asterisks are legal only in negatives, periods are ignored entirely, and an accented spelling counts as a separate keyword.
The third is the sixteen-word rule, which Google spells out with its own long-tail example: a negative keyword falling after the sixteenth word of a search does not block the ad. The fourth is that the three negative match types are not the positive ones. Broad blocks only when every term appears, phrase needs them in order, exact needs them alone. On Display and Video, only a thousand account-level negatives are considered, so a long shared list silently stops applying there.
How it works
Paste the report
Search terms with cost, clicks and conversions, plus your current negative lists if you have them.
River clusters by intent
Every term assigned to one intent group, then the group priced against its total spend.
Read the calls
A sheet with a verdict per cluster, and the exclusion list grouped by where it goes.
Paste it in
Copy each block into the list it names, then send next month's report to check drift.
What you get
- Terms grouped by the intent behind them, each cluster carrying its combined spend
- One call per cluster: keep it, exclude it, or give it its own exact group
- Every exclusion placed at a level: ad group, campaign, shared list or account
- Singular and plural forms written out, because negatives do not match close variants
- A match type chosen per exclusion, with the reason it is not broad by default
- Terms already excluded in one campaign and still spending in another, flagged first
Common questions
Why does the level matter so much?
Because a negative in the wrong place either does nothing or does far too much. An exclusion on an ad group protects one theme and leaves the rest of the campaign exposed. The same string on a shared list applied to every campaign can shut down brand traffic. So each exclusion here names its level and says what it would have blocked last quarter.
Can I trust the Match type column in my export?
Read it as a description of the search term, not of your keyword. Google's own documentation says the search term's match type does not have to match the keyword's own, because a wider keyword can match a term narrowly. Dynamic Search Ads and Shopping return no keyword at all and report Exact.
What if I already have hundreds of negatives?
Paste them and they get audited too. The review looks for exclusions blocking terms that now convert, duplicates across three lists, strings with a hyphen that collapsed to one word, and the same term negated in one campaign while it spends in another. The API's search term view reports that last state directly, and it is usually the most expensive one.
Does clustering by intent actually change the answer?
It changes what you are deciding on. Fourteen variants of a job-seeker search look like fourteen rows of small waste and one cluster of real money. Alphabetical order splits them apart and buries the total. One call on the cluster also produces one exclusion that covers all of them, instead of fourteen strings you maintain forever.
Will excluding terms hurt my volume?
Every exclusion here shows the clicks, cost and conversions it would have blocked over the window in your export, so you decide with the number in front of you. Clusters that convert at any price keep a keep call. Where a cluster converts expensively the recommendation is its own exact-match group, or a wider structure rebuild when it keeps happening.
How often should this run?
Monthly on a stable account, weekly on a new one or after a match-type change. Search terms drift as Google widens matching, so a list built once decays. Send the next report and the same clusters get re-priced, which shows you which exclusions held and which new intent arrived. The account audit covers the structural side on a slower cycle.
Search Term and Negative Keyword Review
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