Paste your search terms report — AI flags the junk that's wasting your budget, with a negatives CSV ready to import.
AI reads every search term that triggered your ads and flags the budget-wasters — job seekers, DIY searches, wrong cities, "price of" shoppers — with a reason for each. Download the junk as a negatives CSV.
⚡ Doing this weekly by hand? Our premium Broad Match Cleaner script does it automatically every hour, directly in your account.
Every week, Google Ads shows your ads to searches you never intended to target. Some are obvious — a plumbing company showing for "how to become a plumber." Others are subtle — a premium kitchen renovation company showing for "cheap kitchen makeover ideas." Both waste your budget. The search terms report is where campaigns bleed money silently, and most advertisers only check it once a month, if ever.
This free AI Search Term Cleaner lets you paste your entire search terms report and get back a flagged list of budget-wasters, organised by junk type, with a ready-to-import negatives CSV. No login, no subscription — just cleaner campaigns.
In a typical Google Ads account running broad match or phrase match keywords, 30–50% of clicks come from searches the advertiser never intended. These include job seekers searching for employment, DIY enthusiasts who will never hire anyone, researchers looking for information (not services), people in the wrong location, and competitors doing competitive research.
Each of these clicks costs real money. A plumber paying £8 per click and getting 50 irrelevant clicks per week is burning £400/week — £1,600/month — on traffic that will never convert. Cleaning your search terms report and adding proper negatives is often the fastest way to improve return on ad spend without changing your bids or budgets.
In Google Ads, go to Keywords → Search Terms. Select your date range (last 30–90 days works best). Download as CSV.
Copy the "Search term" column and paste it into the tool. You can paste hundreds of terms at once — one per line or comma-separated.
Each term is classified with a junk reason. Review the flags — confirm ones you agree with, uncheck any the AI got wrong (false positives happen).
Export confirmed junk terms as a negative keyword list CSV, ready to import into Google Ads Editor or directly via the Negative Keywords tool.
When adding negatives from a search term clean, match type matters enormously:
Our export uses phrase match by default, which is the right balance for most accounts. You can adjust match types in Google Ads Editor after import.
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Weekly for new campaigns or accounts with high spend. Monthly for stable, mature accounts. The first clean of any account usually finds the most waste — subsequent cleans find fewer junk terms as your negative list builds up.
Broad match and phrase match keywords allow Google to match your ads to semantically related searches. Google's algorithm sometimes gets this wrong, especially for local service businesses where the intent signals are subtle. Negative keywords are your control mechanism.
Only if you add negatives that conflict with your target keywords (called "keyword conflicts"). The tool generates negatives based on intent signals (job seekers, DIY, etc.) which rarely conflict with service-intent keywords. Google Ads Editor has a conflict checker you can run after import.
Performance Max has limited negative keyword support — you can add campaign-level negatives but not ad-group level. The cleaned list from this tool works for PMax negatives. For Search campaigns, you have full control.
Basic search term cleaning removes obvious junk. Advanced analysis finds opportunity. After removing the budget-wasters, look for three patterns in your remaining terms: high-click-zero-conversion terms (keywords triggering clicks but never converting — these need negative keywords or separate ad groups), new keyword opportunities (search terms you weren't bidding on that have converted — add them as exact match keywords), and location signals (terms containing city names or neighbourhoods that reveal where your customers are searching from — use this to refine geo-targeting).
Professional account managers run this analysis monthly. Our tool handles the first layer — removing junk — automatically. The opportunity mining (second and third layer) requires human judgment, but it becomes much easier when the noise is already removed.
The most effective negative keyword strategy isn't one-time cleaning — it's a system that continuously improves. Here's the professional workflow: Week 1 — add universal negatives from our Negative Keyword Lists tool. Week 2 — clean search terms report with this tool and add confirmed junk. Monthly — review new search terms, add any new junk patterns. Quarterly — audit your negative list for conflicts and outdated terms. Annually — full account negative keyword audit as part of strategic review.
Over 12 months, this system typically reduces irrelevant clicks by 60–80% compared to an account with no negative strategy. The compounding effect is significant: as your negative list grows, Google learns to match your ads to better searches, gradually improving the quality of organic matching over time.
Performance Max campaigns don't show a traditional search terms report. Instead, Google provides a "Search Categories" view that shows broad categories of searches your ads appeared for. This makes search term cleaning harder but not impossible. Add your negative keywords at the campaign level — PMax supports campaign-level negatives. Focus on the most damaging junk categories: job-seeker terms, competitor names you don't want to appear for, and location terms outside your service area. For more granular control, keep a parallel Search campaign running alongside PMax — it provides the detailed search term data you need to identify new negatives, which you can then apply to PMax as well.
Your search terms report doesn't just tell you what to exclude — it tells you exactly how your customers describe their own problems. A plumber might be bidding on "blocked drain repair" but finding that customers search "water not draining in sink," "slow drain bathroom," and "kitchen sink blocked completely." These natural-language search terms reveal the vocabulary your customers use — and your landing page should reflect that language.
After cleaning the junk terms, look at your highest-converting search terms and compare them to your landing page copy. If customers search "emergency plumber no call-out fee" but your landing page says "professional plumbing services," you have a message mismatch. Update your landing page to use the exact language your best-converting customers use. This is the highest-impact SEO and CRO insight you can extract from your PPC data.
The right cleaning frequency depends on your campaign setup and spend level. High-spend accounts ($5,000+/month) should review search terms weekly — the volume of new data is high enough that weekly reviews catch problems before they become expensive. Medium-spend accounts ($1,000–5,000/month) benefit from fortnightly reviews. Low-spend accounts (under $1,000/month) can manage with monthly reviews. Campaigns using broad match keywords need more frequent cleaning than phrase match or exact match campaigns, because broad match generates more irrelevant search variation.
Consider a local AC repair company spending $3,000/month on Google Ads. Industry data suggests 35% of their search terms are irrelevant — job seekers, parts buyers, DIY researchers. That's $1,050/month being spent on clicks that will never become service bookings. After a thorough search term clean and negative keyword implementation, that 35% drops to 12% — saving $690/month. The 2-3 hours spent on cleaning and ongoing monthly review generates $8,280/year in savings, with no increase in budget or bids.
For the same $3,000 budget, the cleaned account now effectively has $3,690 worth of qualified traffic (at the same CPC). If the pre-clean conversion rate was 5% and post-clean is 8% (due to higher traffic quality), lead volume increases from approximately 19 to 30 per month — a 58% increase in leads with zero increase in spend. This is why search term cleaning is consistently cited as the highest-ROI optimisation in Google Ads management.
For best results, build search term cleaning into a structured monthly workflow. On the 1st of each month: export last month's search terms report from Google Ads. Run it through this Search Term Cleaner. Download the flagged terms as negatives CSV. Import into Google Ads Editor, run conflict check, sync. Also review non-flagged terms for new keyword opportunities (terms with conversions you weren't bidding on). Add high-converting terms as exact match keywords. Document the process in a shared sheet so any team member can run it. This 2-hour monthly process, consistently executed, compounds significantly over 12 months — your negative list grows, your keyword list refines, and your account steadily improves its signal-to-noise ratio.
The junk search term patterns differ significantly between e-commerce and local service campaigns. E-commerce advertisers need to watch for informational queries ("what size should I buy," "review of [product]"), competitor brand searches they're accidentally triggering, and searches for complementary but non-converting products. Local service businesses face a different profile dominated by job seekers, DIY researchers, and equipment buyers — which is why our pre-built lists skew heavily toward service business patterns. If you run both e-commerce and service campaigns in the same account, clean each campaign type against its relevant pattern set rather than applying a single universal list to everything.
The AI in this tool identifies patterns based on intent signals in the search query itself, making it effective for both business types without requiring you to select a category first. However, understanding the different junk profiles helps you manually review the flagged list and catch any false positives — queries the AI flagged that are actually relevant to your specific business model.