How To Add Negative Keywords To Performance Max In 2026

For years the honest answer to “how do I stop Performance Max wasting money on the wrong searches?” was a shrug and a support ticket. You could see the junk in the reporting and you had almost no way to block it. That era is over.

Here’s the quick version. In 2026 you add negative keywords to Performance Max in two places: at the campaign level, where you can now hold up to 10,000 per campaign, and at the account level, where a single list of up to 1,000 applies across every campaign you run. Both only filter the Search and Shopping side of PMax, not YouTube, Display, Gmail or Discover. This post covers exactly where to add them, how to find the terms worth blocking, and the mistake that quietly kills PMax performance when advertisers get trigger-happy with the list.

What you can and can’t block in Performance Max

Two things to get straight before you touch anything.

First, negative keywords in PMax only apply to Search and Shopping inventory. Performance Max spreads your budget across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Gmail and Discover, and your negatives only reach the first two. So a negative keyword stops you showing on a text or shopping search query. It does nothing about where your ad runs on YouTube or the Display network. Those need placement exclusions and content-suitability settings, which are a separate control.

Second, you have two levels to work with, and they do different jobs:

• Campaign-level negatives live inside one Performance Max campaign. Google raised the cap here from 100 to 10,000 in 2025, so you can run a serious exclusion list without hitting a wall. Use these for the waste specific to one campaign.
• Account-level negatives apply across the whole account. The limit is 1,000, and unlike the campaign list they reach Search, Performance Max, App, Shopping, Smart and Local campaigns in one go. Use these for the terms you never want to pay for anywhere: competitor complaints, “jobs”, “free”, “scam”, anything off-brand.

Most accounts want both. A tight account-level list for the universal junk, and campaign-level lists for the queries that only matter to a specific product or service.

Add negative keywords at the campaign level

This is the one people ask for, because it finally lives where you’d expect it.

1. Open the campaign, then go to Keywords under the Campaigns icon.
2. Select the Negative keywords tab.
3. Click the plus button and choose your Performance Max campaign.
4. Enter your keywords, one per line, or select an existing negative keyword list.
5. Set the match type with the usual symbols (broad, “phrase”, [exact]) and save.

Two things worth knowing here. You can apply a shared negative keyword list to a PMax campaign now, so if you maintain a master exclusion list you don’t have to rebuild it campaign by campaign. And Google will show you a predicted-performance read before you commit, so you can see roughly what a set of negatives is likely to do to your traffic before it goes live. Look at it. A negative that’s forecast to cut a third of your converting search volume is not a negative, it’s a self-inflicted wound.

Add account-level negatives for the stuff you never want anywhere

If a term is wrong for your business full stop, don’t add it to one campaign. Add it once, at the account level, and let it cover everything.

Go to the Admin icon, open Account settings, expand the Negative keywords section, click the plus, paste your list one per line, choose the match type and save. That list now applies to Search and Shopping inventory across the account, PMax included.

This is the fastest brand-safety win in most accounts. Build a standing list of the obvious offenders and the profanity, complaint and “free / cheap / DIY” terms that never lead to a sale, and you plug a leak that runs across every campaign at once. It’s the single housekeeping job I’d do first on any account I inherit.

How to find the terms worth excluding

Blocking blind is guesswork. The good news is PMax finally gives you real search terms to work from.

Open the campaign, go to Insights and reports, and open the Search terms report. You now see the actual queries that triggered your Search and Shopping ads, with the metrics attached, and you can segment by ad format to separate shopping traffic from text. Read it the way you’d read a normal search terms report.

• Zero-intent junk. Queries that clearly aren’t a buyer: “how to”, “free”, “salary”, “jobs”, a rival’s returns policy. Straight onto the negative list.
• Wrong-product matches. Searches for something adjacent that you don’t sell. Block the modifier, not the whole theme, so you keep the good traffic.
• Near-miss intent. Queries that convert but sit slightly off your core. Don’t block these. Feed them back as search themes or into a dedicated Search campaign where you control the message.

Do this against real spend and conversions, not a hunch. The point of a negative is to remove clicks that were never going to pay, so the query has to prove it’s waste before it earns a place on the list. If you want the wider case for pairing PMax with proper Search coverage instead of letting it run unsupervised, we made it in why a PMax campaign without Shopping leaves money on the table.

Don’t over-block: the trap

Here’s where I’ll take a side. The biggest risk with PMax negatives isn’t too few, it’s too many.

Performance Max earns its keep by finding converting queries you’d never have thought to bid on. Every negative you add narrows the space it’s allowed to explore. Bury the campaign under a thousand defensive exclusions and you don’t get a cleaner campaign, you get a hobbled one that can’t do the one job it’s good at. Google’s own guidance treats negatives as a control for essential brand safety and clearly irrelevant terms, not as a scalpel for micromanaging every query, and for once I agree with it.

So the discipline is: block what’s provably wasteful or off-brand, and leave the rest. If you find yourself excluding a term because it “feels” low quality rather than because the data shows it losing money, stop. That’s the instinct that turns a strong PMax campaign into an expensive, throttled one.

How often to work this

Treat it as a light monthly habit, not a project. Pull the PMax search terms report once a month, add the genuine waste to the right level (account for universal junk, campaign for the specific stuff), and promote the near-miss winners into search themes or a Search campaign. Between reviews, leave it alone so the campaign can keep learning. A short, regular pass beats a mass exclusion event you do once and never repeat, then quietly regret.

Get a second pair of eyes on your PMax spend

If your Performance Max is spending well and you can’t quite see where the waste is going, that’s exactly what an outside look is for. Start with a free Google Ads audit and I’ll show you which queries are draining budget, whether your negatives are helping or strangling the campaign, and what to fix first. If you’d rather we run it so the search terms report gets mined every month without you chasing it, that’s what our Google Ads management work is built to do.

FAQ

Can you add negative keywords to Performance Max in 2026? Yes. You can add up to 10,000 negative keywords at the campaign level and up to 1,000 at the account level. Both apply to the Search and Shopping inventory in your PMax campaigns, not to YouTube, Display, Gmail or Discover placements.

Where do PMax negative keywords apply? Only to Search and Shopping inventory. They stop your ads showing on the search queries you exclude, but they don’t control YouTube, Display, Gmail or Discover, which need placement exclusions and content-suitability settings instead.

Should I use campaign-level or account-level negatives? Both, for different jobs. Put universal junk and off-brand terms on the account-level list so they cover every campaign at once, and use campaign-level negatives for waste that only affects one specific PMax campaign.

How do I find search terms to exclude in Performance Max? Open the campaign, go to Insights and reports, and open the Search terms report. It shows the actual queries that triggered your Search and Shopping ads. Add the clearly wasteful and off-intent ones as negatives, and leave the converting near-misses alone.

Can too many negative keywords hurt Performance Max? Yes. Every negative narrows the space PMax is allowed to explore, and finding unexpected converting queries is the thing it does best. Block what’s provably wasteful or off-brand, and resist excluding terms on a hunch.