Ecommerce Negative Keyword List: 250+ Terms for Google Ads

Why does an ecommerce store need a negative keyword list?

Because broad match, AI Max and Performance Max push your ads onto searches you never chose, and a large share of those searches have no intent to buy. A negative keyword list shuts the door on queries like "free", "jobs" or "how to make" before they eat your budget.

Wasted clicks in ecommerce accounts tend to come from the same handful of patterns: people looking for something free, people looking for a job at your company, people who want to make the product themselves, bargain hunters after used or rental items, and people who just want information. These patterns barely change from one store to the next, so a starter list protects a new account from day one. Product-specific waste you can only find in your own search terms report, which is what the weekly routine at the end of this guide is for.

Don't paste the list below wholesale. Read each group against your own catalog: a fabric store sells to people who search for "sewing patterns", while for a clothing brand that query is almost always waste. For where negatives fit into the bigger picture, see our Google Ads optimization guide.

Limits are from the Google Ads Help Center pages on account-level negatives and account limits, as of September 2026.

Which negative keywords should every online store add?

Four groups almost never produce a sale for a retailer: free and pirated content, jobs and careers, DIY and education, and pure information searches. Adding them at account level is the lowest-maintenance way to block them everywhere.

Free, giveaway and download intent

Jobs, careers and B2B searches

DIY, how-to and education searches

Informational and media searches

How do you filter out used, rental and post-purchase searches?

If you sell only new products, exclude used, rental and repair searches. Your own customers' order-tracking and returns searches belong as negatives in non-brand campaigns. Several words here have double meanings, so pick match types carefully.

Should you exclude cheap, knockoff and competitor searches?

It depends on your positioning. For a premium brand, "cheapest", "wholesale" and "knockoff" searches rarely bring profitable sales; for a discount store, "cheap" may be the best keyword in the account. Marketplace and competitor names should never be excluded without data.

"Dupe" deserves its own decision: in beauty and fashion it has become a mainstream shopping word, and if you sell affordable alternatives it may be a keyword, not a negative. Deciding on "cheap" is also hard without knowing your break-even point. Compare the revenue per dollar of ad spend these terms produce against your account target; the formula in what ROAS is and how to calculate it is all you need.

How do negative keyword match types work?

A broad match negative blocks your ad when the search contains all the negative's words in any order; phrase match blocks it when the words appear in the same order; exact match blocks only that exact search. Unlike positive keywords, negatives don't expand to close variants, synonyms or plurals.

The examples come straight from Google's help page. The practical point for English: Google handles casing and misspellings for you, but not plurals. "job" does not block "jobs", and "coloring page" does not block "coloring pages", which is why the lists above include both forms where both are common.

• Add single, unambiguous words (torrent, salary, wikipedia) as broad match.
• Limit words that can also signal buying intent (free, cheap, reviews, dupe) to phrase or exact match, or specific phrases.
• Enter singular and plural forms as separate lines: job/jobs, sewing pattern/sewing patterns, rental/rentals.
• Periods are ignored; ampersands and asterisks are recognized, and accented and unaccented spellings (cafe, café) count as two different negatives.
• In queries longer than 16 words, a negative that appears after the 16th word may not block the ad.

Account-level negatives or shared negative keyword lists?

Put terms you never want in any campaign at account level, and terms that only apply to a product group or campaign type in shared negative keyword lists. Using both keeps maintenance to a minimum.

You can also apply lists in bulk from Campaigns → Campaigns: select the campaigns, then Edit → Edit targeting → Add negative keyword lists. For a single campaign, go to Campaigns → Keywords → Negative keywords and use the plus button, where you can pick an existing list instead of typing terms again.

How do you add negative keywords to Performance Max?

Performance Max accepts campaign-level negative keywords and negative keyword lists, but they only apply to Search and Shopping inventory, not YouTube, Display or Gmail placements. Account-level negatives already apply to PMax automatically.

According to Google's help page, go to Campaigns → Keywords → Negative keywords tab, click the plus button, choose your Performance Max campaign, and either enter keywords one per line (using quotes or brackets for phrase and exact) or select an existing list. Then save. Before you save, the interface can show an estimate of how the new negatives will affect performance; check it before adding single-word broad negatives. Google's account limits page lists a general cap of 10,000 negative keywords per campaign, with a lower 1,000 cap only for Display and Video campaigns, so for most stores the real constraint is review time, not list space.

To see which searches actually spend money in PMax, use the search terms report together with the channel breakdown; we walk through reading both in PMax negative keywords and the channel report. If AI Max is turned on in your Search campaigns, the range of matched queries widens, which makes an up-to-date negative list even more important; details in our AI Max for Search guide.

How do you set up a weekly search terms routine?

Once a week, sort the last 7 or 14 days of search terms by cost and add non-converting, wrong-intent terms to the right list. It takes 20 to 30 minutes and closes the product-specific gaps no starter list can catch.

1. Open the report Campaigns → Insights and reports → Search terms; set the date range to the last 7 or 14 days.
2. Sort by cost Sort the Cost column descending and filter to rows with zero conversions.
3. Read the intent For each term ask: would this person buy from me today? If no, exclude it; if maybe, wait for more data.
4. Add it at the right level Universal terms go to account level, product-specific terms to the matching shared list; choose the match type using the rules above.
5. Check next week Confirm the new negatives haven't cut off a search that used to bring sales.

A worked example: a store spends $5,000 a week on Google Ads. In the search terms report, queries containing "jobs", "salary" and "track order" spent $300 combined with zero sales. Excluding them moves roughly 6% of the weekly budget back to searches with buying intent. The figures are hypothetical; run the same calculation on your own report.

If you'd rather catch spending spikes automatically than read every query line by line, Marpany's ad performance screen shows Google Ads spend next to your store's actual sales and flags which campaigns are wasting more budget week over week.

How to start using this list today

This week, add the universal groups at account level, split the product-specific groups into shared lists, and put the weekly review on your calendar.

• Review the free, piracy, jobs and informational tables and add the terms that fit to account-level negatives.
• Create one shared list for used, rental and post-purchase terms and apply it to non-brand campaigns.
• Decide on bargain, fake and competitor terms one by one, using the last 30 days of conversion data.
• Remove any word that overlaps with what you sell (parts, manual, video, game, refurbished, dupe, hire).
• Block 30 minutes every Monday to open the search terms report.