500+ Universal Negative Keywords List

Negative keywords are the most underused lever in Google Ads. Every campaign leaks budget to irrelevant searches, and most advertisers only add negatives reactively after reviewing search term reports — which means weeks of wasted spend before the list is useful.

This CSV gives you a starting point on day one. It contains 500+ negative keywords grouped into categories: job and career intent (resume, job posting, salary, interview), education and research intent (course, tutorial, how to, free), competitor signals (vs, alternative, review, comparison), geographic exclusions for common mismatches, and irrelevant product variations.

The list is designed to be imported directly into Google Ads as a shared negative keyword list and applied account-wide. It won't be perfect for every account — you'll still need to review search term reports and add industry-specific negatives — but it eliminates the most common sources of irrelevant traffic from launch.

The CSV includes a column for the match type (broad, phrase, exact) so you can customise aggressiveness based on account volume and budget. There are also notes on which categories to skip for certain industries (e.g., some "free" queries are valuable for SaaS lead gen).