Does Performance Max use keywords? No, but you still have controls

The short answer: no bidding, but plenty of control

Does Performance Max use keywords? Not the way a Search campaign does. There is no keyword list to bid on, no match types, and no keyword-level bids. Google decides which searches your ads appear on, and you find out afterwards.

That is not the same as having no controls. PMax gives you three kinds of control, and they sit in three different places in the account, which is why most advertisers think they have fewer options than they do. You can block searches with negative keywords, at account level and at campaign level. You can exclude brands, yours and everyone else’s. And you can hint at demand with search themes.

So PMax does have keywords. They all live in the negative column, which is a bit like being handed the aux cord and told you can pick any song you want skipped.

This post is about what each control genuinely blocks and what it quietly does not. If you want the campaign type explained from scratch, start with our guide to Performance Max campaigns, or Google’s own documentation.

Account-level negative keyword lists

Start here, because it covers the most ground for the least effort. An account-level negative keyword list lives in your account settings rather than inside a campaign, and it applies across every campaign you run, PMax included. Set it once and you stop maintaining the same exclusions in five places.

Negative keywords stop your ads showing on searches containing those terms. In a PMax campaign that means Search and Shopping inventory, where there is a query to match against in the first place.

What belongs on the account list

• Free, cheap, DIY, second hand. Words that describe people who were never buying at your price.
• Jobs, careers, salary, courses. Job seekers and students, unless you sell to them.
• Wholesale, supplier, manufacturer for retail accounts, and the reverse for trade accounts.
• The waste you already know about. Pull the losing terms out of your existing Search campaigns. You have paid for that research once already.

What it does not do

It does not touch YouTube, Display, Gmail or Discover. Those placements are not driven by a search query, so there is nothing for a negative keyword to catch. If your spend is landing somewhere you would rather it did not on the Display network, no amount of negative keywords will move it, and you want placement exclusions instead.

One clearly named list at account level beats six half-maintained lists scattered across campaigns. The best account structure is the one a human can still understand six months later.

Campaign negative keywords in Performance Max

Campaign-level negative keywords let you block a term in one PMax campaign without blocking it across the account. That matters when a word is waste for one part of the business and revenue for another: a plumber running separate campaigns for emergency call-outs and bathroom renovations does not want identical exclusions on both.

Google caps the list at 100 negative keywords per Performance Max campaign at the time of writing, which is deliberately low, so treat it as a scalpel rather than a wall. Broad, permanent exclusions belong on the account list. The campaign slots are for terms that are only wrong in that campaign.

Negatives behave the way they do in Search, which trips people up. They do not match close variants, so blocking plumber does not block plumbers, and a negative phrase match only catches the word order you actually typed. If you want to be thorough, add the plurals and the obvious misspellings yourself.

Brand exclusions are not negative keywords

Brand exclusions are a separate setting that does a job negative keywords do badly. Apply a brand list to a PMax campaign and Google stops it serving on searches for those brands, including the misspellings and variations you would never think to write out by hand.

There are two reasons to use them, and the first one is not really optional.

1. 1Exclude your own brand. Left alone, PMax will happily serve on searches for your business name and take credit for conversions you were getting anyway. Exclude your brand from PMax and run those searches in a separate brand Search campaign, where you can see what they cost honestly.
2. 2Exclude other brands. If you never want to appear against a particular competitor, or against a stockist you also supply, this is the clean way to do it rather than guessing every spelling.

Brand exclusions also beat the do-it-yourself version. Plenty of accounts try to block their own name with negative keywords and end up chasing typos forever, because negatives do not match close variants and customers are inventive spellers. The brand list handles the variations for you, which is the entire reason the setting exists.

One limit worth knowing: brand exclusions apply to Search and Shopping inventory. They shape which searches you turn up on, not what happens across the rest of Google’s network. They are also not retrospective, so excluding your brand today does nothing for last quarter’s numbers.

A PMax campaign quietly harvesting your own brand searches is the most common reason a reported return on ad spend looks healthier than the business does.

Search themes are hints, not targeting

Search themes are the closest thing PMax has to a keyword, and the gap between the two is the whole point. You add short phrases describing what your customers search for, and Google allows up to 25 per asset group at the time of writing. Google treats them as an input, not an instruction.

They tell the system where to look first. They do not tell it where to stop. Add “commercial solar installation Adelaide” and PMax will explore that demand sooner than it otherwise would, then carry on serving wherever else it thinks a conversion is hiding.

That makes them the same shape as audience signals: an accelerator, not a fence. The useful part is that they respect your exclusions, so a search theme cannot override a negative keyword or a brand exclusion you have already set.

Use them where you genuinely know something. The terms your Search campaigns already convert on, the phrasing that turns up in enquiries, the services you want more of. Skip them if you are guessing, because a confident wrong hint costs you learning time you cannot get back.

What search themes will not do is clean anything up. If PMax is buying searches you do not want, adding better themes does not remove the bad ones, it stacks another suggestion on top of them. Blocking is a separate job with separate settings, which is the pattern running through all of this.

What to set up, and when not to bother

1. 1Account-level negative list. Pull the known waste terms out of your existing Search campaigns and apply one list across the account. Half an hour, covers everything you run.
2. 2Brand exclusions on the PMax campaign. Your own brand at minimum, and do it before you judge a single performance figure.
3. 3Read the reporting before you block anything. PMax search data is coarser than a Search campaign, but the search terms report exists. Block real waste, not imagined waste.
4. 4Campaign negatives for the specific cases. Sparingly, because of the cap.
5. 5Search themes last. Only for the demand you have evidence for.

Now the part that does not usually make the pitch. For most underperforming PMax campaigns, keywords are not the problem. Before you spend an afternoon writing exclusions, check whether your conversion tracking is honest, whether you are feeding the machine lead quality or just form-fills, whether your product feed is accurate, and whether the landing page does its job. Fixing measurement moves more money than any negative keyword list will.

And if you are getting a handful of conversions a month, do not build negative lists at all. The campaign has not learned anything yet, and a short list of blocked terms will not change that. The real question is whether PMax should be running in an account your size, which is the conversation in is Performance Max worth it.

If you would rather have someone open the account and tell you what your PMax campaign is genuinely buying, that is a standard part of our Google Ads management work.

Frequently asked questions