Negative Keywords from Search Terms: Find Waste Weekly

You open the Google Ads search terms report, scroll for a minute, and there it is: clicks on searches that have nothing to do with what you sell. Job seekers. DIY tutorials. Customer login searches. A city you don’t serve. You know you should be pulling negative keywords from search terms every week. Every one of those lines produced nothing, and the spend keeps going out until someone stops it.

The cost is more than the money. When budget goes to the wrong searches, the right ones get less of it. Smart Bidding can learn from traffic that was never going to convert. The person who should do the cleanup is busy, so the review gets skipped until someone asks why cost per lead crept up.

Kyō, who leads Kyōsey AI’s team of AI marketing experts, reads that report for you. She finds the spend that produced nothing and sorts it by how sure she is. She hands back a negative keyword list ready to import into Google Ads Editor, along with the converting searches worth promoting and the expensive ones worth investigating. You review the list and import it yourself.

What Kyō Does with Your Search Terms Report

This is a fast, repeatable skill, built to run every week or two. Each pass is grounded in what your account actually bought. Every recommendation is backed by spend that already happened, not by guesses about what might go wrong. That is what makes it the low-risk way to keep an account clean.

On each run, Kyō:

• Pulls the search terms for your serving campaigns over a window that fits your volume: a month for most accounts, longer for quieter ones. That includes Performance Max, whose search terms are reported in a different place from Search campaigns’. Kyō looks there, so a PMax account is never mistaken for one with no waste.
• Leaves brand campaigns out by default. Brand searches can look wasteful on a strict conversion test, and they almost never are.
• Checks your existing negatives, so she doesn’t propose terms you’ve already blocked.
• Sets a waste bar scaled to your account, in your own currency. A small account’s small leaks still show up, and a large account isn’t buried in noise.
• Classifies every search term by what it cost, what it produced and what the searcher meant.

How Kyō Chooses Negative Keywords from Search Terms

The hard part isn’t finding junk. It’s not blocking the searches that look like junk but aren’t. A bad negative fails silently. The campaign just gets quieter, and nothing in the interface tells you why.

Kyō is careful in the places where weekly cleanups usually go wrong:

• She reads intent, not just the zero in the conversions column. A term that is clearly off-topic or from the wrong vertical is treated differently from one where the intent is genuinely ambiguous. The ambiguous ones go to a separate review list with her reasoning attached.
• She knows your kind of business. An online store, a lead-gen service business and a long-cycle B2B company waste money in different ways, and each has searches that should never be blocked. Kyō applies the patterns for your type of account, drawn from the methods of experienced strategists.
• She protects the terms that look like waste and aren’t. Comparison, pricing and local searches are often your best-intent traffic. They are exactly the terms a hurried weekly cleanup blocks by reflex.
• She chooses match types conservatively. Phrase match is her default. Broad match negatives are reserved for words no legitimate search could contain, because they are the riskiest object in an account. And she organises changes so a mistake is easy to roll back.

A Hypothetical Example

Picture a regional HVAC company. A search like “hvac technician jobs” has spent money with no leads, and the searcher is plainly looking for work. That is high-confidence waste, and Kyō would prepare it as a negative.

A search like “furnace replacement cost near me” might also show zero conversions this month. But it carries pricing and local intent, the kind of search a homeowner makes shortly before calling. Kyō would not block it on reflex. She would leave it running or send it to review with her reasoning.

What You Get from Each Run

The output is files you can use, not a slide deck about waste.

Alongside the files, you get a short summary in chat:

• How many search terms she read, and how much spend that covered
• How much she identified as waste, and what share of spend that is
• How many negatives are ready and how many need review
• How many converters and underperformers she found
• The top wasted searches by spend, with a reminder of how to import them and when the next run is due

If you’d rather have something readable than importable, she can present the findings as a clean report too. But the files are the work product: ready to load, with nothing left to reformat.

Why The Converters Matter as Much as The Negatives

A cleanup that only returns negatives has read the report with one eye shut. Kyō looks in both directions.

Converters to promote. Some of your best leads and sales come from searches you don’t target directly, caught only by a broader keyword. Kyō flags these so you can add them as exact-match keywords and control their bids and ads.

Underperformers to investigate. Some searches do convert, but at a cost far above your target. Blocking them would throw away real customers. Kyō flags them as what they usually are: a match-type or landing-page problem worth fixing, not a negative.

Sometimes the real complaint is poor lead quality rather than wasted clicks. Negatives are the wrong tool for that, and Kyō will say so and point to the fix that addresses lead quality.

You Stay in Control

Nothing goes live without your OK. For this skill, that is literal. Kyō prepares the lists, and you or your team import them through Google Ads Editor. Review matters here more than almost anywhere in an account, because a wrong negative quietly switches off traffic and reports nothing.

The skill is built for repeat use. The first run on a neglected account usually finds a lot, and later runs find less. That is the account getting cleaner, not the skill running out of things to do. Each time, Kyō tells you when the next pass is due, usually in a week or two, so new waste is caught while it’s still small.

Who This Is for

• Business owners running their own Google Ads who know money is leaking but don’t have time to read search terms line by line.
• In-house marketers who want a thorough, consistent cleanup on a regular schedule instead of the review that keeps getting pushed to next week.
• Agencies managing many accounts. Each account gets its own pass, so every client receives the same careful review, with the safeguards that stop good traffic being blocked by reflex.

This skill is one of many. Kyō works with AI experts in Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Meta, ChatGPT Ads, search and content, tracking, strategy and creative. They connect to your ad platforms and data, including Google Ads, GA4, Search Console, Shopify, CallRail and HubSpot. Their skills are the methods of experienced strategists, more than 100 person-years of agency experience, written down so they are followed every time. Your data stays yours. You can see the full team on the Features page.

How to Start

Not another tool. Your A-Team. A careful search terms review is the work that so often gets skipped, and here it is just one of the jobs Kyō handles, all of it as elite agency performance for $6/day.

Ten minutes on a call beats a hundred feature lists. Book a demo and see it on your own account: what it bought last month that you’d never have paid for, the negatives Kyō prepares, and the converters she thinks you should be bidding on directly.