Google Ads Quality Score is one of the most obsessed-over numbers (looking at you, Optimization Score) in Google Ads. Entire agency pitch decks have been built around the promise of “improving your Quality Score” as though it’s a credit rating that unlocks better mortgage terms. It isn’t. Google themselves call it a diagnostic tool, which is a polite way of saying “stop treating this as a KPI.”
And yet, it does matter, just not in the most intuitive ways. In 2026, with Smart Bidding processing hundreds of auction signals you’ll never see, broad match expanding intent beyond anything a keyword-level score can capture, and Performance Max not even showing you a Quality Score at all, the relationship between that little 1–10 number and your actual campaign performance has gotten complicated. There are accounts chasing 10/10 on keywords that are already profitable at a 5, and accounts ignoring a score of 3 on their highest-spend keyword while wondering why CPCs keep climbing.
This guide covers what Quality Score actually controls in the auction, how it interacts with Smart Bidding, and, most usefully, a framework for knowing when a low score is a genuine problem worth fixing and when it’s a distraction from the metrics that actually pay your bills.
TL;DR
Is Google Ads Quality Score a KPI?
No. It is a 1–10 diagnostic tool meant to help you spot issues with your ads, not a primary measure of success.
What makes up Quality Score?
It is determined by three metrics: Expected Click-Through Rate, Ad Relevance, and Landing Page Experience.
How do I fix a low score?
Check your reports to see which specific component is “Below Average.” Fix that component, don’t try to optimize all three at once.
Should I pause keywords with low scores?
Never pause a profitable keyword based on score alone. If it hits your CPA targets, the algorithm is already finding the right auctions.
How should I prioritize my work?
Filter by spend. Only focus on high-cost keywords, check them monthly, and ensure your post-click conversion offer is actually working.
If I could take one thing away from this article, what would it be?
Quality Score is a diagnostic filter, not a scorecard; focus on your conversion tracking and negative keywords, and the score will largely take care of itself.
What is Quality Score?
Quality Score is a keyword-level diagnostic rated 1 to 10, built from three components:
- Expected click-through rate
- Ad relevance
- Landing page experience
Each component is rated “Above Average,” “Average,” or “Below Average” based on how you compare to other advertisers who showed ads for the exact same searches over the last 90 days.
Components of Quality Score
Every Quality Score is made up of three components, each rated independently. When the overall score is low, the component breakdown shows exactly where the problem lies, so you don’t need to fix everything at once. You need to fix the one that’s “Below Average” and drag the rest down.
You can find each of these in the modify columns section of your ads report.
Expected Click-Through Rate
This is Google’s prediction of whether users will click your ad when it shows for this keyword. It’s relative; your CTR is compared to other advertisers competing on the same keyword in the same position. An “Average” rating means you’re in line with competitors. “Below Average” means their ads are getting clicked and yours aren’t.
The instinct when eCTR is low is to rewrite ad copy. Sometimes that’s the right move, but more often, the fastest fix has nothing to do with your ads; it’s the queries that trigger them. If your keyword matches 1,000 searches a month, but 400 of those are irrelevant queries where no reasonable person would click your ad, your CTR looks terrible even if every relevant impression gets a click. The irrelevant impressions are dead weight, dragging down the ratio.
Check your Search Terms Report first. If you see a pattern of irrelevant queries, tighten your negative keyword strategy before touching ad copy. Removing those wasted impressions often improves eCTR without changing a single headline. If the search terms are clean and the queries are relevant, but people still aren’t clicking, then it’s an ad copy problem. Test different headline angles, get more specific with your offer language, and make sure your ads give Google enough diverse combinations to find what resonates.
Ad Relevance
This measures whether the keyword’s intent matches the ad that shows for it. A keyword about “running shoes” triggering an ad about “athletic footwear clearance” is a relevance mismatch; the intent is specific, but the ad is generic.
The root cause is almost always the ad group structure. When an ad group contains keywords with different intents, “running shoes,” “hiking boots,” and “casual sneakers” all in one group, the campaign has to serve all three. It can’t be highly relevant to all of them simultaneously. The ad becomes a compromise that’s vaguely related to everything and tightly matched to nothing.
The fix is structural, not creative. Split the ad group so each group contains keywords that share a single clear intent, and write the ad assets to speak directly to that intent. “Running shoes” and “trail running shoes” can live together. “Running shoes” and “formal dress shoes” cannot. This principle holds even with broad match in 2026; the ad group’s theme still tells Google what kind of ad to assemble from your headlines and descriptions. A tighter theme gives the algorithm better raw material to work with.
Ad relevance problems don’t always start with ad group structure. Sometimes the keyword itself is too broad or misaligned with what the business actually offers. If the keyword doesn’t reflect a query your ideal customer would type, no amount of ad copy refinement will make the ad feel relevant. Getting keyword selection right from the start, which we cover in the Complete Keyword Planner Guide, prevents ad relevance issues before they show up in your Quality Score.
Landing Page Experience
This evaluates whether the page users land on is relevant to the keyword, loads quickly, and provides a good experience, particularly on mobile. Google assesses content relevance, page speed, navigation clarity, and whether the page delivers on what the ad promised.
If this component is “Below Average,” start with the mechanical check: run the URL through Google PageSpeed Insights. A page that takes four seconds to load on mobile will score poorly regardless of how relevant the content is. If speed is fine, the problem is content alignment. The most common issue is sending all keywords in an ad group to the same generic page, even though different keywords deserve different landing pages. Someone searching “enterprise CRM pricing” and someone searching “free CRM trial” have fundamentally different intent; sending both to the homepage is a relevance failure that the landing page score will reflect.
The harder truth about this component is that it’s the slowest to fix. eCTR improvements from negative keywords can show within days. Ad relevance improvements from restructuring ad groups take about a week. Landing page improvements require design or development work, page speed optimization, and sometimes entirely new pages, which means weeks or months. Prioritize it, but don’t wait for it. Fix the other two components first while the landing page work progresses in parallel.
Does Quality Score Matter in 2026?
The short answer is yes, but the relationship between that 1–10 number and your actual campaign performance has changed.
The auction still uses ad quality signals. When your ad enters an auction, Google evaluates expected CTR, relevance, and landing page experience in real time to calculate Ad Rank and determine your per-click bid. A higher-quality ad still wins better positions at lower CPCs than a lower-quality ad with the same bid. That fundamental mechanic is the same as it was five years ago. Quality Score, as a proxy for those signals, still points to how “high quality” your ad is.
However, as automation in Google Ads increases, the platform processes hundreds of auction-time signals that your visible Quality Score doesn’t capture. User device, browser, location, time of day, audience membership, remarketing status, search context, the algorithm evaluates all of these per auction and adjusts your bid accordingly. This means a keyword with a Quality Score of 4 can still be profitable because Smart Bidding selectively bids only in the auction contexts where that keyword actually converts. The aggregate QS looks bad, but the algorithm isn’t bidding on the aggregate; it’s bidding on individual auctions where real-time quality signals are stronger than the historical average would suggest.
In situations where a keyword has a score of 3 or 4, but it’s converting at or near your target CPA under Smart Bidding, do not pause this keyword. The algorithm has found auction segments where it works despite the low aggregate score. Investigate the components; maybe there’s an easy eCTR fix through negatives or an ad relevance fix through ad group restructuring that would lower CPCs further. But the keyword stays. A profitable keyword with a low Quality Score is still a profitable keyword.
What if it were the other way around, though? This is the scenario that confuses people most. The keyword has a score of 7 or 8, the ad is relevant, the CTR is strong, but conversions aren’t coming, or the CPA is too high. Quality Score can’t diagnose this because the problem is downstream of the click. The ad is doing its job, getting the right people to click. Something after the click is failing: the landing page isn’t converting, the offer isn’t compelling enough, the form is too long, or the audience has intent to research but not to buy. Check your conversion tracking to make sure the data is accurate, then focus on post-click experience rather than ad quality.
Quality Score Across Match Types and Campaign Types
Quality Score is a Search campaign metric calculated at the keyword level. That definition creates confusion the moment you step outside tightly matched exact keywords, because the way Google calculates and displays QS doesn’t translate cleanly to how modern campaigns actually operate.
Broad match keywords often show low Quality Score, and that’s expected. QS is calculated based on how your keyword performs for searches that exactly match it. But broad match triggers your ad for conceptually related queries, not exact matches. The keyword “running shoes” on broad match might trigger for “best trainers for marathon training”, a relevant query that converts, but one far enough from the original keyword that ad relevance and eCTR scores suffer in the aggregate.
A low QS on a broad match keyword doesn’t necessarily mean your ads are poor. It often means the keyword’s reach is wider than a keyword-level score can capture. If the keyword is converting profitably, the low score is not the problem.
As per Google’s guide on the subject, Google calculates Quality Score for broad match keywords by borrowing data from exact match keywords in the same ad group when the broad match keyword doesn’t have enough impression data on its own. So if you have both “running shoes” as a broad match and exact match in the same ad group, the broad match keyword will often display the same QS as the exact match, even though the actual queries triggering the broad match version are completely different.
Performance Max doesn’t have Quality Score. PMax doesn’t operate at the keyword level, so there’s no keyword-level score to evaluate. Google still assesses creative quality and landing page experience in PMax auctions behind the scenes, but you can’t see or diagnose those signals the way you can in Search. If you need to evaluate creative quality in PMax, you’re relying on asset performance ratings and PMax reporting, not QS.
Shopping campaigns use feed quality as the relevance signal. Your product title, description, images, and attributes are effectively your “ad copy” in Shopping. Optimizing feed quality, keyword-rich titles, accurate product categories, and complete attributes has the same effect as optimizing ad relevance in Search.
How to Optimize Ads With Quality Score?
Quality Score is most useful when you treat it as a filter rather than a to-do list. Not every low score needs fixing, and not every keyword deserves the same level of attention. This workflow prioritizes where your time actually moves the needle.
Step 1: Start with the keywords that are spending your budget. Sort by cost descending and focus on the top 20–30 keywords by spend. A Quality Score of 3 on a keyword with two impressions last month is noise. A Quality Score of 3 on a keyword that spent $2,000 is a problem worth solving. If you only have time for one QS review per month, this filter ensures you’re focusing on the keywords where improvements directly reduce costs.
Step 2: Check the component breakdown. Add the columns for expected CTR, ad relevance, and landing page experience. Whichever component is “Below Average” tells you exactly where the problem is. Don’t guess; the components are the diagnosis. One “Below Average” component and two “Above Average” components are a focused fix. All three “Below Average” usually means the keyword doesn’t belong in that ad group at all.
Step 3: Cross-reference with conversion data. Apply the four-quadrant logic from the previous section. Low QS and poor conversions, fix it or pause it. Low QS and good conversions, investigate the components for easy wins, but don’t disrupt what’s working. High QS and poor conversions, the problem is downstream of the click, not in ad quality.
Step 4: Prioritize by speed of fix. eCTR improvements through negative keywords can show results within days. Ad relevance improvements through ad group restructuring take a week or two. Landing page experience improvements require design or development work and take longer to implement. Start with the fastest lever first and let the slower work run in parallel.
Step 5: Review monthly, not weekly. Quality Score doesn’t move overnight. It’s calculated on a 90-day rolling window of impression data, so daily or weekly checks create the illusion of stagnation when the metric simply hasn’t had enough new data to shift. A monthly review of your high-spend keywords, component statuses, trends over time, cross-referenced with conversion performance, is the right cadence. Build it into your standard campaign management rhythm rather than treating it as a separate workstream.
Conclusion
Quality Score indicates whether your ads, keywords, and landing pages align with what users are searching for. It doesn’t tell you whether your campaigns are profitable. Treating it as a diagnostic, filtering to high-spend keywords, reading the component breakdown, and cross-referencing with conversion data, turns it into a useful tool. Treating it as a KPI turns it into a distraction.
Get the inputs right, conversion tracking that measures what matters, a negative keyword strategy that keeps irrelevant traffic from dragging down your CTR, a bidding strategy matched to your account’s data maturity, and Quality Score takes care of itself. Those three inputs solve more Quality Score problems than any amount of direct QS optimization ever will.
If you want a full diagnostic of how your account’s quality signals line up against actual performance, that’s what our audits are built for. You can refer to our Spring Cleaning Audit Checklist for Google Ads
And if that sounds like more than your team has bandwidth for, that’s exactly the kind of work we ace for teams across North America.
Book a free account audit, and we’ll show you exactly where your negative keyword gaps are costing you.
Excellent overview, will be implementing some of these tips.