By the Lenoretech SEO Strategy Team · Reviewed by a senior SEO strategist · Last updated: June 2026
Start by blocking the five universal waste buckets - free, jobs, DIY, competitor, and adult/illegal intent - then layer industry-specific terms on top. The list below gives you 200+ ready-to-paste negatives, but the part most guides get wrong is match type: negative keywords do not behave like positive keywords, and that single misunderstanding causes more wasted spend than a missing list ever will.
We have audited hundreds of Google Ads accounts, and the pattern is almost always the same. A campaign launches with broad or phrase keywords, the search terms report fills up with junk within 72 hours, and nobody cleans it. After 90 days, 20-40% of spend is gone on searches the business can never convert. Negative keywords are the cheapest, highest-leverage fix in paid search. Here is the framework we actually deploy.
The match-type rule that breaks most lists
Negative keywords use the same match types as positive keywords - broad, phrase, exact - but with one critical difference: negatives never expand. Google does not apply synonyms, plurals, misspellings, or close variants to your negatives. If you block exact [free], it only blocks the literal search "free" - not "for free" or "freebie". This is the single biggest gotcha.
- Negative broad match (free trial): blocks any search containing ALL these words in any order. "free trial software" is blocked; "free software" is NOT (missing "trial").
- Negative phrase match ("free trial"): blocks searches with those words in that order. "best free trial" is blocked; "trial free" is NOT.
- Negative exact match ([free trial]): blocks ONLY the exact term "free trial" with nothing added.
The practical rule: use negative phrase match for most intent words (free, cheap, jobs, DIY) so you catch them inside longer queries, and reserve negative exact only when a phrase has a legitimate version you want to keep. Example: a recruitment agency blocking [jobs] as exact still shows for "marketing jobs near me" - exactly what they want. Get this wrong and you either block too little (single-word broad negatives that miss every variant) or too much (a phrase negative that silently kills a high-converting query). Because Google will never warn you, the damage shows up only as a slow, invisible bleed in your cost-per-conversion.
Universal negatives: block these in every account
These five buckets apply to almost every B2C and B2B advertiser. Add them at the account level via a shared negative keyword list (Tools > Shared library > Negative keyword lists) so every campaign inherits them. Use phrase match unless noted. A single shared list applied to all campaigns is also far easier to maintain than pasting the same terms into ten ad groups by hand.
1. Free / no-cost intent (low purchase intent):
- free, for free, freeware, freebie, no cost, gratis, free download, free trial, free sample, free version, free online, free template, free tool, free course, free pdf, free shipping (block only if you charge shipping)
Searchers who add "free" to a query are telling you they have no budget. They still click - and on broad match they click a lot - so a single uncaptured "free" variant can quietly eat 5-10% of a small account's monthly spend with a near-zero conversion rate.
2. Jobs / careers / employment (job seekers, not buyers):
- jobs, job, careers, career, salary, salaries, hiring, vacancy, vacancies, recruitment, internship, intern, resume, cv, apprenticeship, work from home, part time, full time, employment, wages, "how to become"
Job-seeker traffic is brutal for service businesses because the searcher uses the exact same head term as your buyer - "HVAC", "digital marketing", "law firm" - just with an employment modifier. These visitors never become customers, so every rupee spent on them is pure loss.
3. DIY / how-to / education (researchers, not customers):
- diy, do it yourself, how to, tutorial, guide, course, courses, training, learn, certification, examples, definition, meaning, what is, wiki, wikipedia, pdf, ppt, "step by step"
DIY and how-to searchers want to solve the problem themselves, not pay you to do it. They have informational intent, not commercial intent, and they bounce off a sales landing page instantly - hurting both your budget and your Quality Score.
4. Adult / illegal / brand-unsafe:
- porn, xxx, sex, nude, naked, escort, gambling, casino, crack, torrent, pirated, hack, hacked, cracked, keygen, serial key, illegal
These rarely match for most businesses, but when they do - usually via loose broad-match keywords - they waste money and can attach your brand to searches you never want to be associated with. Block them once at the account level and forget about them.
5. Low-value modifiers (bargain hunters, students, secondhand):
- cheap, cheapest, low cost, discount, coupon, promo code, used, second hand, refurbished, wholesale, bulk, sample, student, reddit, quora, review, reviews, complaints, scam, vs, alternative, alternatives
Note on "review", "vs", and "alternative": these are sometimes valuable for comparison and competitor campaigns. Block them in your core sales campaigns only, not account-wide, if you run a dedicated comparison campaign. The same logic applies before you decide where paid budget should sit at all - our breakdown of PPC vs SEO covers when each channel earns its keep.
Competitor and brand negatives
If you do NOT run a deliberate competitor-conquesting campaign, add your top competitors' brand names as phrase-match negatives in your generic campaigns. This stops Google from spending your budget on people searching for a rival by name - traffic that converts poorly and inflates CPCs. Conversely, in a Brand campaign, add every non-brand commercial term as a negative so brand and generic budgets stay clean. Mixing them is the most common reason brand campaigns look artificially cheap and generic campaigns look artificially expensive.
Industry-specific negative lists
Layer these on top of the universal list. These come straight from waste we have removed in live accounts, and each vertical leaks in a slightly different way.
E-commerce / retail:
- diy, pattern, how to make, recipe, replica, fake, knockoff, dupe, repair, fix, return policy, track order, near me (if you ship only), rental, rent, hire, second hand, olx, amazon, flipkart, meesho
Retail accounts bleed on two fronts: marketplace names (people searching "amazon" or "flipkart" want the marketplace, not your store) and post-purchase queries like "track order" and "return policy" that are existing customers clicking a paid ad you are paying for. Blocking marketplace terms alone often recovers a meaningful slice of spend - see our guide to ranking a Shopify store for the organic side of the same problem.
SaaS / software:
- free, open source, github, api docs, login, sign in, download, crack, lifetime deal, appsumo, nulled, self hosted, tutorial, jobs, salary, "is X down", status page
SaaS is the worst offender for "free" and "open source" - both signal a user who will never pay - plus existing-user navigation terms like "login" and "status page" that have zero acquisition value. We dig into the full acquisition funnel in our piece on SaaS lead generation.
Home services (plumbing, HVAC, roofing, electrical):
- diy, how to fix, how to install, parts, supplies, jobs, salary, license, certification, training, school, wholesale, manufacturer, "for sale", warranty claim, recall, lawsuit
Home services attract heavy DIY and parts-shopping traffic - "how to fix" and "parts" searchers are trying to avoid hiring you. One HVAC account we cleaned cut 31% of wasted spend in the first 30 days simply by phrase-blocking the DIY, parts, and jobs buckets above. If leads are your goal, pair this with our playbooks on getting more plumbing leads and more HVAC leads.
Healthcare / dental / clinics:
- jobs, salary, school, college, degree, certification, symptoms, home remedy, free clinic, government, insurance claim, "what is", side effects, medicine name, pharmacy, generic
Clinics waste budget on symptom-research traffic ("symptoms", "what is", "home remedy") - people self-diagnosing, not booking - and on "free clinic" and "government" searches looking for no-cost care. Block the research and free-care terms and your cost-per-booking drops fast.
Real estate:
- jobs, agent salary, license, course, exam, foreclosure (if not your model), zillow, magicbricks, 99acres, fake, scam, rent (if selling), buy (if renting), "how to become an agent"
Real estate leaks on portal names (zillow, magicbricks, 99acres) and on the buy-vs-rent mismatch - a seller paying for "rent" clicks is funding the wrong intent entirely. Block the opposite-transaction term and the portals first.
Legal / financial / B2B services:
- free, template, sample, diy, jobs, salary, internship, course, certification, exam, definition, "what is", pro bono, government, calculator, reddit, forum
Professional services attract "template", "sample", and "pro bono" searchers who want the deliverable without the fee, plus heavy education traffic from students. These never convert into paid retainers, so phrase-block the whole research-and-free cluster.
See our PPC management service or book a free audit →
How to find your own negatives (the part that never stops)
A pasted list is the starting line, not the finish. The real work lives in the search terms report (Campaign > Insights and reports > Search terms). For new campaigns, review it twice a week for the first month, then weekly. Sort by cost, scan for any term that does not match buyer intent, and add it as a negative. We have seen accounts recover the cost of an entire month's management fee in the first cleanup session alone.
As you scan, work top-down by spend, not alphabetically - the top 20 highest-cost search terms usually hide 80% of the waste. For each junk term, decide the match type deliberately: a one-off oddity goes in as exact, a recurring theme (every "free X" variant) goes in as phrase so you catch the whole family. Group your negatives into themed shared lists (one for "jobs", one for "DIY", one for "competitors") so they are reusable across every new campaign you launch and easy to audit later.
Two habits separate accounts that stay clean from those that rot. First, never set a campaign live without the universal list already attached - prevention is cheaper than cleanup. Second, treat the search terms report as a keyword-discovery tool, not just a blocking tool: the same report that surfaces waste also surfaces high-intent queries you should add as positive keywords. If your campaigns are starved of good terms to begin with, our walkthrough of free keyword research without paid tools shows how to build the positive side of the list properly.
Done consistently, negative keyword management is the single highest-ROI hour you will spend on a Google Ads account each week. It costs nothing but attention, it compounds (every term you block stays blocked), and on the typical account we audit it claws back the 20-40% of spend that was funding clicks the business could never convert. If you would rather hand this off, our team runs this exact process on every account we manage - the math almost always pays for itself in the first month.