The search terms report is the one Google Ads screen that shows you what people actually typed before they cost you money.
Google's own definition is narrower than most advertisers assume: it is a list of search terms that a significant number of people have used, and that resulted in your ad being shown. Not every search. The ones Google decides to show you.
Most small accounts never open it, or open it once when the bill looks wrong. A thread on UK Business Forums from a new business owner who lost about £2,500 in a few days got the same reply from three different people: look at the search terms, find the irrelevant clicks, block them. As one poster put it, "you really have to watch the search terms reports and remove irrelevant traffic to get the costs down."
This is the routine we use for that. The clock matters: an untimed review turns into an afternoon, and an afternoon review happens once a quarter. Ten minutes a week, same day each week, is enough for an account spending under about £5,000 a month.
Why weekly beats monthly for a small account
A weekly check catches a bad match after one week of spend instead of four. Google's help page says the terms in the report can differ from your keyword list depending on your matching options. With broad match or AI Max on, they differ a lot. A new junk term that costs £8 a day is £56 after a week and £240 after a month. The report does not get harder to read at a month; it just gets more expensive to have ignored.
There is a second reason. Negatives added from the report default to exact match, and negative match types "work differently than their positive counterparts and don't match to variants". So a negative you add this week blocks that one phrasing. Next week you will see the plural, the misspelling and the synonym, and you need to be there to block those too.
Minutes 0 to 2: set up the view
Open the report at Campaigns, then Insights and reports, then Search terms, and set the date range to the last seven days. Google does not show the Keyword column by default. Turn it on through the columns icon, Attributes, Keyword, because you need to see which keyword pulled in each term to know where the negative belongs.
Then do two things to the table. Sort by cost, highest first. Add a filter for conversions equal to zero. What you are left with is a ranked list of searches that cost money and produced nothing in the last week. That list is the whole job. If your account has fewer than ten rows on it, the routine takes four minutes, not ten.
One caveat before you start cutting. A term with zero conversions in seven days is not proof it never converts. For anything with fewer than about 20 clicks, check the same term over 90 days before you block it. Only block on the seven-day view when the term is obviously wrong, which is what the next step is for.
Minutes 2 to 6: scan for the five junk categories
Almost all wasted spend in a UK service account falls into five groups, and you can spot each one by eye without reading the metrics. Run down the sorted list and tag each row.
| What you see | Example from a Northampton plumber's account | Action | Where to add the negative |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jobs and training | "plumber jobs northampton", "plumbing apprenticeship", "gas safe course" | Block | Account level or shared list, so every campaign is covered |
| DIY and how-to | "how to fix leaking tap", "boiler pressure too low what to do" | Block, unless you sell the parts | Campaign level |
| Competitor names | "british gas boiler repair", "checkatrade plumber" | Block if you have never converted on them; keep if you have | Campaign level, phrase match |
| Wrong location | "plumber in milton keynes" when you only cover Northampton | Block the place name, then check location settings | Campaign level, or fix the location targeting |
| Wrong service | "plumber salary", "plumbing supplies near me", "free boiler scheme" | Block | Account level for "free", "salary", "supplies"; campaign for the rest |
The first and fifth rows are where the money usually goes, because the words are generic. "Free", "jobs", "course" and "salary" turn up in every trade and every profession. They belong on an account-level list once, not in each campaign.
Competitor names are the one row where people over-block. If a search for "british gas boiler repair" brought you a booked job last month, it is a keyword, not a negative. The report tells you which: scroll to the conversion column before you decide.
Wrong-location terms deserve a second look at the campaign itself. If "milton keynes" is in your report, either your location targeting is set to "presence or interest" instead of "presence", or your radius is wider than you think. Blocking the town name treats the symptom.
Minutes 6 to 8: add the negatives at the right level
Tick the junk rows and use Add as negative keyword. Google gives you three places to put them: the ad group or campaign the term came from, an existing negative keyword list, or a new list applied to every campaign the terms came from.
The default is exact match, which means "plumber jobs northampton" blocks only that string. For the jobs and DIY rows, change it to phrase match by wrapping the word in quotes, so "jobs" blocks every search containing jobs. Google's own warning applies in the other direction: "make sure you're using the right match type that doesn't prevent your ads from showing". A phrase negative on "free" will also block "free quote plumber", which you probably want.
Put generic waste (jobs, course, salary, free, DIY, how to) on one shared list and apply it to every search campaign, ideally built from a starter negative keywords list before the account ever spends. Put anything campaign-specific (a town you do not cover, a service a sister campaign sells) at campaign level. If you run Performance Max as well, account-level negatives are the only kind that reach it, so the generic list is better held there.
Minute 8 to 9: note the winners
Switch the filter to conversions greater than zero and sort by cost again. You are looking for search terms that converted but do not match any keyword you hold, or match a broad keyword loosely. Those are candidates to add as exact or phrase keywords in their own ad group, with an ad written for that phrasing.
Do not add them this minute. Write them in a note and add them next week if they convert again. One conversion from a 90-day view is a lead; two in a fortnight is a keyword. Adding a keyword on one conversion fills the account with single-hit phrases that then need their own negatives.
Minute 9 to 10: check what the report is not showing you
This is the step most guides skip, and it is the one that tells you whether the first nine minutes covered the account or a fraction of it. Google omits low-volume searches. Its wording is that some search terms that don't have enough query activity are omitted from the search terms report, to keep with its standards on data privacy. Google has never published the threshold for standard Search campaigns.
The gap is not small. When the change came in on 1 September 2020, Seer Interactive measured the share of search-network cost that still had a visible search term across its client accounts. It fell from 98.7% to 71.0% overnight, and the click figure fell from 98.3% to 77.9%. Roughly £27 in every £100 of spend lost its query.
A 2026 study points the same way. Igor Ivitskiy at Doctor Ads pulled the search terms insights category report for 88 managed accounts and 6.6 million clicks. He found that the median account had 44.0% of its clicks in the unlabelled "other search terms" row, with the middle half of accounts between 26.0% and 78.4%. Pooled across all clicks it was 29.9%, because bigger accounts clear the threshold more often. The category report has no cost column, so that figure is clicks, not spend.
Google's own description of that row, from the search terms insights help page, is "search terms that have lower spend or don't have an identifiable search category", and the categories are built from terms "including those not exposed in the search terms report due to privacy reasons". So search terms insights is the one place you can see the hidden terms, as groups with a click count, never as a list.
The one-minute check is this. Open search terms insights for the campaign, find the "other search terms" row, and read its share of clicks. If it is under a third, the routine above is covering most of your spend. If it is over half, as it was for more than a quarter of the accounts in the Doctor Ads sample, you cannot negative your way out of the waste, because you cannot see it. The fix is upstream: tighter match types, a smaller keyword set, or a location setting that stops the problem before the auction.
How AI Max changes the report
AI Max for Search adds matches your keywords never asked for, and the report gained new columns to show them. Since July 2025 the match type column includes "AI Max" for those terms, and Google's AI Max help page describes a source column "that shows if the match is because of broad match expansion or keywordless matching". There is also a combined view of search term, headline and landing page, because AI Max can write the headline and pick the page as well as the match.
Two things about the new columns catch people out. First, Google's AI Max reporting page warns that filtering the report to match type "AI Max" understates the traffic, because that filter "doesn't consider Other search terms". The hidden row from minute nine is hidden from the AI Max filter too. Second, you can now exclude a landing page as well as a term: the same page says to select rows and choose "Add as negative keyword" or "Add as negative URL". If AI Max keeps sending searches to your careers page, block the page.
There is a bigger change underneath. In May 2026 Google added a line to the search terms help document saying that for searches through Lens, AI Mode, AI Overviews and autocomplete, the term shown "represents the best approximation of the user's intent", and that these searches "are not considered technically identical to a keyword". Anthony Higman, who spotted the change, summarised what it means for the routine:
"Keywords may not actually be used at all." Anthony Higman, quoted by Search Engine Roundtable, 13 May 2026
For the weekly check, that means a row in the report is sometimes Google's paraphrase of a longer conversational query, not the string someone typed. An exact negative on that paraphrase may block nothing. In an AI Max campaign, lean on phrase negatives for the five junk categories and on negative URLs, and give new negatives two weeks before judging whether they worked.
The routine on one line
Seven days, sort by cost, zero conversions, five categories, negatives at the level that covers the most campaigns, winners noted not added, then read the size of the "other" row. If that last number is climbing week on week, the account has a targeting problem that no negative list will solve, and that is the week to stop adding negatives and look at match types instead. A weekly review like this is one of the five things a UK Google Ads agency should do for its fee.
If you would rather someone ran this on your account every week and reported the "other" share alongside the cost per lead, that is part of our paid media management, and you can get in touch here.