The Ultimate 2026 Negative Keyword List: 7 Templates to Stop Wasting Ad Spend

In paid search, what you don't target is just as important as what you do. A well-curated negative keyword list is the single most powerful tool for eliminating wasted ad spend, improving lead quality, and maximizing your return on investment. If your campaigns are attracting clicks from irrelevant searches, you're not just losing money; you're actively diluting your performance data and making it harder to optimize for real customers. This isn't about minor tweaks; it's about fundamentally restructuring who sees your ads.

Most advertisers, however, rely on generic, incomplete lists that leave their campaigns exposed to budget-draining clicks from low-intent searchers, job seekers, and bargain hunters. For a comprehensive understanding of how to run efficient ad campaigns and address wasted spend, an ultimate guide to PPC for lawyers provides foundational knowledge that applies across many professional service industries. The core principle is simple: proactively block irrelevant traffic before it costs you a single cent.

This guide isn't just another list of obvious terms. It's a strategic framework for building robust, industry-specific exclusion lists that protect your budget and focus your ads squarely on users ready to convert. We will break down the 7 essential categories of negative keywords every advertiser must implement, complete with real-world examples from e-commerce, law, healthcare, and B2B sectors. By the end, you'll have downloadable CSV templates and a clear, actionable plan to plug the leaks in your campaigns. This process ensures every dollar of your ad spend works harder to achieve your business goals.

1. Competitor Brand Names & Trademarked Terms

One of the most powerful and immediate ways to refine your ad targeting is by creating a negative keyword list comprised of competitor brand names and their trademarked terms. This strategy prevents your ads from appearing when a user’s search query explicitly includes a competitor, ensuring your budget is spent on prospects genuinely open to your solution, not those already loyal to another brand.

When a user searches for "HubSpot CRM features," their intent is highly specific. Placing an ad for your alternative CRM in front of them is often a losing battle. The click-through rate (CTR) will likely be low, and even if they do click, the conversion rate is typically abysmal. These clicks drive up your cost-per-acquisition (CPA) without delivering qualified leads. For agencies like Rebus, which manage over $100M in ad spend, meticulously filtering out competitor-intent searches is a foundational step in maximizing return on investment.

Why This Belongs on Your Negative Keyword List

Adding competitor brands to your negative keyword list immediately improves campaign efficiency. It filters out users with high brand affinity for a rival, focusing your ad spend on a more receptive audience. This leads to a healthier CPA, improved conversion rates, and a more accurate picture of your campaign's performance against non-branded, solution-oriented keywords.

Key Insight: Bidding on competitor terms can sometimes be a valid aggressive strategy, but for most campaigns, it's a budget drain. Exclude them by default and only target them intentionally with a separate, highly-controlled campaign and budget.

Practical Examples Across Industries

• E-commerce: A boutique selling handmade leather goods would add Amazon, eBay, and Etsy as negative keywords to avoid competing with massive marketplaces on general searches like "leather messenger bag."
• B2B SaaS: A startup offering a project management tool would exclude terms like Asana, Trello, and Jira to capture users searching for "project management software" rather than a specific, established platform.
• Legal: A personal injury law firm would add the names of all major competing firms in their city to ensure their ads appear for "car accident lawyer near me," not "smith & jones law."

This video offers further insights into structuring your ad groups to account for competitive terms.

Actionable Tips for Implementation

• Build a Master List: Create and maintain a comprehensive spreadsheet of all direct and indirect competitors. For a deeper dive into identifying these rivals, learn more about how to conduct a thorough competitor analysis.
• Include Variations: Add common misspellings, abbreviations, and product names associated with your competitors.
• Use Precise Match Types: Add competitor brand names as phrase match and exact match negatives. This prevents you from accidentally blocking relevant long-tail keywords that might happen to contain a competitor's name in a broader, non-competitive context.
• Schedule Regular Reviews: Audit your search term report monthly to discover new competitors entering the market or different ways users search for existing ones. Add these new terms to your negative keyword list.

Beyond simply avoiding competitor terms for ad spend efficiency, understanding how to handle intellectual property issues is crucial for brand defense. Learning about fighting trademark infringement can provide a more complete strategy for protecting your brand online.

2. Low-Intent Informational Keywords

One of the most critical filters for a high-performing PPC account is separating users who are researching from users who are ready to buy. Adding low-intent informational keywords to your negative keyword list achieves exactly that. This strategy stops your ads from showing for broad, educational queries like "how to" or "what is," which attract users in the early stages of the awareness funnel who have no immediate intent to make a purchase or submit a lead.

These informational searches can generate a high volume of impressions and clicks, but they rarely convert. A user searching for "what is acupuncture" is gathering knowledge, not booking an appointment. For performance-focused agencies like Rebus, which prioritize lead generation and conversions, eliminating this traffic is fundamental. It ensures that every dollar of ad spend is directed toward high-intent users actively searching for a solution, consultation, or product.

Why This Belongs on Your Negative Keyword List

Adding informational terms to your negative keyword list dramatically improves lead quality and protects your budget. It prevents you from paying for clicks from users who are simply curious, not qualified. This refinement leads to a lower cost-per-acquisition (CPA), a higher conversion rate, and a cleaner set of performance data, allowing you to optimize your campaigns based on commercially-driven search behavior.

Key Insight: While informational content is vital for SEO and content marketing, it's often a budget killer in PPC. Reserve your ad spend for bottom-of-funnel keywords and let your organic content capture top-of-funnel traffic for free.

Practical Examples Across Industries

• Healthcare: A local clinic would add what is, symptoms of, and home remedies for as negative keywords to focus on users searching "acupuncture clinic near me" instead of "what is acupuncture."
• Legal Services: A family law firm would exclude how long does divorce take and divorce process steps to target high-intent searches like "divorce attorney consultation" or "family lawyer fees."
• E-commerce: An online running shoe store would add how to choose, best type of, and reviews to avoid users researching "how to choose running shoes" and instead capture those searching "buy Nike running shoes online."
• B2B SaaS: A software company would add negatives like what is lead generation and lead generation guide to focus its budget on users searching for "lead generation services pricing" or "best CRM for sales leads."

Actionable Tips for Implementation

• Create a Modifier List: Build a dedicated negative keyword list of common informational modifiers, such as how, what, why, when, guide, tutorial, example, definition, and learn.
• Analyze Search Term Reports: Regularly review your search term reports to identify recurring informational query patterns that are driving clicks but no conversions. Add these themes to your negative list.
• Understand User Intent: Map your keywords to the marketing funnel. A deep understanding of user motivation is key; for a complete overview, you can learn more about search intent and how it impacts campaign success.
• Use Phrase Match: Apply these informational terms as phrase match negatives. This will block queries containing these phrases (e.g., "what is a negative keyword list") while still allowing your ads to show for relevant long-tail variations that may be valuable.

3. Free & Budget-Conscious Modifiers

Another critical category for your negative keyword list involves filtering out searchers whose primary intent is finding the lowest possible price, not the best value. By adding terms like free, cheap, discount, and coupon as negatives, you can immediately disqualify traffic from bargain hunters who are unlikely to convert, especially if you offer a premium product or service. This refinement protects your profit margins and focuses your budget on attracting customers who value quality over cost.

For businesses built on healthy margins, premium service, or professional expertise, clicks from users searching for "free legal advice" or "cheap Nike shoes" are often a waste of ad spend. These searchers have a fundamentally different purchase intent. Their focus on price means they are less likely to become loyal, high-value customers, and attracting them can skew performance data, leading to a higher cost-per-acquisition (CPA) for low-quality leads.

Why This Belongs on Your Negative Keyword List

Adding budget-conscious modifiers to your negative keyword list is a defensive strategy to protect your brand positioning and profitability. It ensures your ads are shown to an audience willing to pay for the value you provide, leading to more qualified leads and a higher return on ad spend (ROAS). This simple step cleans your traffic, improves conversion metrics, and aligns your ad campaigns with your business's core financial goals.

Key Insight: The goal isn't to eliminate all price-conscious customers, but to filter out those exclusively driven by the lowest price. A well-curated negative keyword list lets you control the conversation and attract customers who see the value beyond the price tag.

Practical Examples Across Industries

• Healthcare: A specialized dental clinic offering advanced cosmetic procedures would exclude terms like free dental consultation and cheap braces to attract patients seeking high-quality care, not just the lowest cost.
• Legal Services: A corporate law firm would add free legal advice and cheap divorce attorney as negatives to connect with clients who need and can afford specialized expertise.
• B2B SaaS: A company selling a premium CRM platform would exclude free CRM software and cheapest project management tool to filter out users who aren't in the market for a robust, paid solution.
• E-commerce: A retailer selling high-end athletic wear would add cheap running shoes and discount coupon code to avoid competing with clearance outlets and attract serious athletes.

Actionable Tips for Implementation

• Create a Master Budget List: Compile a core list of negative keywords like free, cheap, bargain, discount, coupon, clearance, budget, and low cost.
• Use Phrase and Exact Match: Implement these terms as phrase match negatives (e.g., "free shipping," "cheap replacement") to avoid blocking broader, relevant queries while still capturing the budget-focused intent.
• Segment Your Campaigns: If you run promotions, create separate, dedicated campaigns for them. This allows you to pause your budget-modifier negatives for the sale-specific campaign without compromising your evergreen campaigns.
• Analyze Search Term Reports: Regularly review your search term reports to identify new price-sensitive modifiers users are searching for. You might find terms like affordable, low price, or even specific dollar amounts to add to your negative keyword list.

4. Job & Career-Seeking Keywords

One of the most common sources of budget waste comes from an audience with zero purchase intent: job seekers. Adding career-related terms to your negative keyword list is a crucial, non-negotiable step to protect your ad spend from irrelevant clicks. This strategy prevents your ads from showing on searches for employment, ensuring your budget is reserved for actual customers, not prospective employees.

When a user searches for "e-commerce marketing jobs" or "SaaS sales careers," their goal is to find employment, not to buy your product or service. Showing them an ad for your e-commerce platform or SaaS tool results in wasted impressions and costly, accidental clicks. These users have no intention of converting, which inflates your cost-per-acquisition (CPA) and skews your campaign data. For the diverse businesses Rebus serves, filtering out this traffic is fundamental to maintaining campaign profitability.

Why This Belongs on Your Negative Keyword List

Adding job-seeking keywords to your negative keyword list instantly eliminates a significant segment of non-customer traffic. This action shields your budget from clicks that will never lead to a sale, directly lowering your CPA and improving your overall return on ad spend (ROAS). It cleans up your performance metrics, allowing you to make more accurate, data-driven decisions based on genuine customer behavior.

Key Insight: Unless you are running a recruitment-specific campaign, there is virtually no scenario where a search containing "jobs" or "careers" represents a potential customer. This makes it one of the safest and most impactful categories to add to a universal negative keyword list.

Practical Examples Across Industries

• E-commerce: A business selling online store themes would add work from home jobs, remote jobs selling online, and shopify expert hiring as negatives to avoid job hunters looking for e-commerce employment.
• B2B SaaS: A CRM provider must exclude terms like CRM jobs, project management hiring, and software sales careers to connect with users looking to purchase software, not find a job in the industry.
• Healthcare: A dental clinic promoting its services would add dental assistant careers, hygienist jobs, and nursing jobs to ensure their ads are seen by potential patients, not medical professionals seeking employment.

Actionable Tips for Implementation

• Create a Core List: Start with a foundational negative keyword list of universal job-related terms. Include words like jobs, careers, hiring, employment, recruit, salary, and vacancy.
• Include Location & Role Modifiers: Add variations such as work from home, remote jobs, part-time work, and internship to catch more specific, non-customer searches.
• Use Broad Match: For most job-seeking terms, broad match negative is the most effective match type. The presence of a word like "jobs" or "hiring" almost always disqualifies the user's intent, so a wider net is beneficial.
• Monitor Search Term Reports: Regularly review your search term reports to identify industry-specific job boards or new recruitment-related queries that are triggering your ads. Add these to your list quarterly to keep it current.

5. Negative Geographic & Location Modifiers

For any business with a defined service area, adding negative geographic and location modifiers is a non-negotiable step for eliminating budget waste. This strategy involves creating a negative keyword list of cities, states, countries, or regions where you do not offer products or services. It prevents your ads from showing to users whose search query includes a location you can't serve, ensuring your ad spend is laser-focused on converting geographically qualified prospects.

A user searching for a "plumber in Dallas" has a clear, localized need. If your plumbing company only serves the Houston area, showing an ad to that user is a guaranteed waste of money. These clicks have a zero percent chance of conversion, yet they inflate your costs and skew performance data. For local service businesses, professional firms with jurisdictional limits, and retailers with specific shipping zones, this level of geographic filtering is fundamental to achieving a positive return on ad spend.

Why This Belongs on Your Negative Keyword List

Adding geographic exclusions to your negative keyword list instantly protects your budget from impossible-to-convert clicks. It filters out searchers from outside your service area, focusing your ad spend on users who can actually become customers. This practice directly lowers your cost-per-acquisition (CPA) and provides a much clearer understanding of campaign performance within your target market.

Key Insight: Even with precise location targeting settings in your ad platform, users can still trigger your ads by including location names in their search query. A robust geographic negative keyword list is the essential second layer of defense.

Practical Examples Across Industries

• Legal: A family law firm licensed only in California would add Arizona, Texas, and New York as negative keywords to avoid showing for searches like "divorce lawyer in Arizona."
• Healthcare: A dental practice located in Boston would exclude terms like Chicago, Los Angeles, and Miami to stop paying for clicks from users searching for a "dentist in Chicago."
• E-commerce: A retailer that only ships within the United States would add Canada, UK, Australia, and international shipping to its negative keyword list to avoid clicks from global shoppers they cannot serve.
• Local Services: A roofer based in Austin, TX, would exclude other major Texas cities like Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio to concentrate their budget on local homeowners.

Actionable Tips for Implementation

• Map Your Service Area: Clearly define your operational boundaries. Create an exhaustive list of all states, major cities, counties, and even prominent zip codes that fall outside this area.
• Include National & International Terms: If you operate only within a specific country (e.g., the U.S.), add negative keywords like Canada, Mexico, UK, Europe, international, and worldwide.
• Use Broad Match Negatives: For single-word locations like city or country names (Dallas, Canada), using broad match negative keywords is often effective at blocking irrelevant queries without needing to list every possible variation.
• Audit Search Term Reports: Regularly review your search term report for geographic modifiers you may have missed. Users often search in unpredictable ways, and this report is your best source for discovering new terms to add to your negative keyword list.

Optimizing your paid ads with geographic negatives works best when paired with a strong organic presence. For a deeper understanding of how to dominate your local market, review this comprehensive local SEO checklist to ensure your entire digital strategy is aligned.

6. Brand-Damaging & Controversial Keywords

Protecting your brand’s reputation is just as important as generating leads, and a key part of this defense is a negative keyword list targeting brand-damaging and controversial terms. This strategy prevents your ads from appearing alongside searches that could create a negative association, damage consumer trust, or place your brand in a reputationally compromising context.

When a user searches for terms like "[Your Brand] scam" or "[Your Product] lawsuit," showing an ad can inadvertently validate their concern or associate your official message with negative sentiment. The goal is to ensure your advertising only appears in positive or neutral contexts, preserving the integrity and authority of your brand. For the professional service firms and premium brands Rebus represents, proactively excluding these terms is a non-negotiable step in maintaining a pristine online reputation.

Why This Belongs on Your Negative Keyword List

Adding controversial and brand-damaging terms to your negative keyword list is a crucial brand safety measure. It insulates your campaigns from reputational harm by ensuring your ads do not appear for searches indicating distrust, dissatisfaction, or malicious intent. This preserves brand equity, maintains consumer confidence, and prevents your marketing budget from being spent on clicks from users who are already highly skeptical or hostile toward your brand.

Key Insight: Brand safety isn't just about avoiding placement on inappropriate websites; it's also about controlling the search context. Your negative keyword list is the first line of defense against having your ads appear in search results for reputationally toxic queries.

Practical Examples Across Industries

• Healthcare: A pharmaceutical company or medical clinic would add dangerous side effects, lawsuit, malpractice, and complaints to avoid showing ads to users investigating legal or safety issues.
• Financial Services: An investment firm would exclude terms like Ponzi scheme, fraudulent, bankruptcy, and scam warning to protect its reputation for trustworthiness and financial stability.
• E-commerce: A retailer selling children's toys would add negatives like product dangerous, recall, choking hazard, and fake to avoid association with safety concerns and counterfeit products.

Actionable Tips for Implementation

• Establish Brand Safety Guidelines: Before launching any campaign, create a document outlining terms that are off-limits for brand association. This should include words like scam, fraud, lawsuit, complaints, negative reviews, and fake.
• Create a Proactive List: Build a foundational negative keyword list with common negative modifiers. Think of any term that, if combined with your brand name, would cause reputational damage.
• Monitor Search Term Reports: Regularly review your search term reports for unexpected and undesirable brand associations that have slipped through. A user might search for "[Your Brand] alternative because of poor service," which you should immediately add as a negative.
• Combine with Content Exclusions: For maximum protection on the Display Network and YouTube, pair your negative keyword list with content exclusions to prevent ads from appearing on sensitive or inappropriate videos and websites.
• Act Fast in a Crisis: If your brand faces a PR crisis, immediately update your negative keyword lists with terms related to the issue to prevent your ads from fanning the flames.

7. Question & Support-Seeking Keywords

A crucial step in optimizing your ad spend is filtering out search queries from users who are looking for help, not a new purchase. By adding question-based and support-seeking terms to your negative keyword list, you can stop your ads from appearing in front of existing customers or information-seekers who have no commercial intent. This strategy ensures your budget is reserved for prospects actively evaluating a solution, not those troubleshooting a problem.

When a user searches for "why is my software not working" or "how to return a product," their intent is clearly centered on post-purchase support. Showing them an ad to buy the same product or service is irrelevant and can even create a negative brand experience. These clicks are highly unlikely to convert and will inflate your cost-per-acquisition (CPA), skewing your campaign data and wasting valuable ad dollars on an audience that is not in a buying mindset.

Why This Belongs on Your Negative Keyword List

Adding support and broad-question keywords to your negative keyword list immediately cleanses your traffic of non-commercial queries. It prevents budget waste on clicks from users who need customer service, technical assistance, or general information rather than a new product. This refinement leads to a more accurate CPA, higher quality scores for your ads (as they are more relevant to the remaining searchers), and a clearer understanding of which keywords are actually driving revenue.

Key Insight: Not all questions are created equal. Some, like "what is the best software for accounting," show high purchase intent. The goal is to filter out informational and navigational support queries, not all question-based searches. Analyze your search term reports to distinguish between the two.

Practical Examples Across Industries

• E-commerce: A clothing retailer would add how do I return, order status, fix zipper, and why is shipping slow as negative keywords to avoid showing purchase-focused ads to customers needing post-sale support.
• B2B SaaS: A CRM provider would exclude terms like how do I fix error 404, my account is locked, and cancel subscription to separate new lead generation from existing user support.
• Healthcare: A dental clinic would add negatives like why does my tooth still hurt after filling or what are the side effects of to filter out existing patients or general health researchers from those actively seeking an appointment.

Actionable Tips for Implementation

• Audit Your Search Terms: Regularly review your search term reports for interrogative words like how, why, what, can, and fix. Isolate patterns that consistently lead to low conversion rates.
• Build a Support Keyword List: Create a dedicated list of support-related terms like help, support, broken, not working, issue, problem, refund, and return.
• Use Phrase Match Carefully: Add these terms as phrase match negatives (e.g., "how to fix") to block irrelevant queries without accidentally excluding high-intent searches like "how to buy [your product]."
• Create a Content Strategy: Address these support queries organically by creating robust FAQ pages, a knowledge base, or blog posts. This strategy, detailed further in how to build a full-funnel content plan, captures users with valuable content instead of irrelevant ads.

7-Point Negative Keyword Comparison

From Theory to ROI: Activating Your Negative Keyword Strategy

Throughout this guide, we have moved beyond the basic definition of a negative keyword and into the strategic framework required for peak campaign performance. We've explored seven critical categories of exclusions, from competitor brand names and low-intent informational queries to brand-damaging terms and negative geographic modifiers. Each category serves as a vital filter, systematically channeling your ad spend away from wasteful clicks and toward high-converting traffic.

The downloadable CSVs and industry-specific examples provided are more than just templates; they are your launchpad. The initial implementation of a comprehensive negative keyword list will deliver an immediate and noticeable improvement in key metrics like click-through rate (CTR) and cost per acquisition (CPA). However, the true mastery of this discipline lies in viewing it not as a one-time setup, but as a dynamic, ongoing process of strategic refinement.

Turning Insights into Sustainable Growth

The real value of an expertly managed negative keyword list emerges over time. It transforms your paid search efforts from a broad, speculative net into a finely-tuned, precision instrument. Think of it as an evolving immune system for your ad account, constantly learning to identify and reject irrelevant search queries before they can drain your budget. This proactive defense is what separates average campaigns from exceptionally profitable ones.

Your search term report is the battlefield where this process plays out. By committing to a regular review cycle, you gain invaluable market intelligence. You'll uncover:

• Emerging Search Trends: Identify new, irrelevant query patterns as they arise, allowing you to add broad or phrase match negatives to block entire categories of unwanted traffic.
• User Intent Mismatches: Discover how users are misinterpreting your ad copy or offers, providing crucial feedback for both your negative keyword strategy and your creative assets.
• Cost-Saving Opportunities: Pinpoint specific, high-cost, low-conversion keywords that have slipped through your initial filters and eliminate them immediately.

This continuous loop of Implement > Monitor > Analyze > Refine is the engine of sustained ROI. Each irrelevant search term you add to your negative keyword list is a small victory that, compounded over hundreds or thousands of clicks, leads to significant financial gains and a much healthier sales funnel.

Your Action Plan: Beyond the Initial List

To translate the knowledge from this article into tangible results, your next steps should be clear and methodical. Don't let this be another tab you close and forget. Activate this strategy today.

Immediate Implementation: Download the relevant starter negative keyword list for your industry and upload it to your campaigns. This single action will provide an instant layer of protection.

Schedule Your Audits: Block out time on your calendar right now for your first search term report review. Whether weekly for high-spend accounts or monthly for smaller ones, make it a non-negotiable recurring event.

Expand and Customize: Use the foundational lists as a starting point. Brainstorm terms specific to your niche, products, or service limitations that were not covered. Think about what your ideal customer wouldn't search for.

Embrace the Data: Treat your search term data as a direct line of communication with your audience. It's an unfiltered look into their needs, vocabulary, and misconceptions. Use it to not only refine your negative keyword list but to inform your entire marketing strategy.

By adopting this mindset, you are no longer just buying clicks; you are investing in qualified engagement. You are ensuring that every dollar spent works as hard as possible to attract visitors who are not just looking, but are ready to convert. This is how you build a powerful, efficient, and scalable growth engine for your business.

Tired of manually sifting through endless search term reports? The expert team at Rebus leverages advanced strategies and proprietary tools to build and maintain powerful negative keyword lists, ensuring your ad spend is hyper-efficient. Let us handle the complexities of campaign optimization so you can focus on running your business.