Google Ads Quality Score: What It Affects and How to Fix It
Quality Score isn't an auction input, but ad quality still shapes your CPC. Read the 3 components per keyword and fix what drags your score down.
In this article
Google Ads Quality Score is a 1-10 rating Google gives each keyword in your Search campaigns. It tells you how your ad quality compares with other advertisers, and it’s built from three components: expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. Google is explicit that it plays no part in the auction: “Quality Score is not an input in the ad auction” (Google Ads Help).
Most advertisers fall into one of two camps. Some chase a 10/10 on every keyword; others ignore the score because Smart Bidding “handles quality now”. Both cost money. The useful approach is to treat Quality Score as a diagnostic that points to where the problem sits: your ads, your account structure, or your landing pages.
Key takeaways
- Quality Score is a keyword-level diagnostic, not an auction input. Your position and CPC come from Ad Rank, which Google calculates at every auction (Google Ads Help).
- It has three components: expected CTR, ad relevance, and landing page experience. Google doesn’t publish how much each one weighs, so treat any “formula” you see online as a third-party estimate.
- It’s based on historical impressions for exact searches of your keyword, which is why changing match types doesn’t change it.
- Performance Max and Shopping have no Quality Score, and with broad match the score only describes part of your traffic.
- When the same component is “Below average” across many keywords, the fix is usually structural, not keyword by keyword.
What Quality Score actually is (and what it isn’t)
Quality Score is a 1-10 diagnostic score available at keyword level in Search campaigns. Each of its three components gets a status of “Above average”, “Average”, or “Below average”, based on a comparison with other advertisers whose ads showed for the exact same search over the last 90 days (Google Ads Help).
Three details in Google’s definition get missed a lot:
- It’s historical. It’s built from past impressions, not from what happens in today’s auction.
- It only looks at exact searches. Google says Quality Score “is based on historical impressions for exact searches of your keyword, therefore changing keyword match types will not impact Quality Score.”
- It leaves real factors out. Google lists device, user location, time of day, and assets as ad quality factors that Quality Score might not capture.
If you see a dash instead of a number, that’s not a penalty. It means there haven’t been enough searches that exactly match the keyword to calculate a score.
Quality Score vs. Ad Rank (and ad quality at auction)
The most expensive confusion is between Quality Score and Ad Rank. For years, the industry repeated that Quality Score feeds directly into Ad Rank and that each extra point cuts CPC by a fixed percentage. Google doesn’t say that. Its Ad Rank page lists six factors evaluated at each auction: your bid, the quality of your ads and landing page, Ad Rank thresholds, the competitiveness of the auction, the context of the search, and the expected impact of assets and other ad formats.
Quality counts at auction, but it’s estimated in real time for that specific search. The 1-10 score measures the same three areas (expected CTR, relevance, landing page) after the fact, which is why it’s good for diagnosis and poor for prediction. What Google does state is that “higher quality ads can often lead to lower CPCs”, and that quality helps decide whether your ad is eligible to show at all.
A diagnostic, not a KPI or a formula
Quality Score isn’t a KPI. Google puts it plainly: “You can think of Quality Score as a general indicator of which areas to focus on to improve ad quality, rather than a score to be optimized” (Google Ads Help). I’ve audited accounts with high average Quality Scores that were losing money on poor targeting, and accounts with middling scores that were profitable because the offer and bidding were right. The score shows you where to look, not whether the account works.
There’s also no published formula. If you’ve searched for how much each component counts, you’ll have seen very precise percentages and weightings. Google doesn’t publish any. The closest thing is a reverse-engineered model from Adalysis that starts from a 1-point base and adds up to 3.5 points for expected CTR, 3.5 for landing page experience, and 2 for ad relevance. It’s a useful approximation from a third-party tool, but Google has never confirmed it.
Quality Score vs. Ad Strength
Many people searching for an “ad score” mean Ad Strength, the rating you see while building a responsive search ad. The two are different. Ad Strength checks, before launch, whether your ad has enough varied, relevant headlines and descriptions, and Google says it “doesn’t directly influence your ad’s serving eligibility”. Quality Score is calculated afterwards from real impression data, and it belongs to the keyword, not the ad.
The three components and what actually moves them
| Component | What it measures (per Google) | Main lever |
|---|---|---|
| Expected CTR | How likely your ad is to be clicked when shown for that keyword, irrespective of position and assets | Ad copy: offer, benefit, call to action |
| Ad relevance | How closely your ad matches the intent behind the search | Structure: tightly themed ad groups |
| Landing page experience | How relevant and useful your landing page is to people who click | Ad-to-page consistency, mobile, speed |
Expected click-through rate
Expected CTR is Google’s estimate of how likely your ad is to be clicked for that keyword. Google calculates it assuming the search matches the keyword exactly, and it strips out the effect of ad position and assets (Google Ads Help). You’re competing against every other advertiser on that search, not against your own CTR last month.
What moves it: ad copy that answers the searcher better than the ads around it. Google’s own advice is to make the offer more compelling, highlight a specific benefit, and use clear calls to action. A searcher typing “emergency boiler repair” who sees “Heating Services. Get a Quote Today.” won’t click at the same rate as “Emergency Boiler Repair. Same-Day Engineers Available.” The second ad speaks to what the person actually wants.
To improve this systematically, rather than swapping ten headlines at once, see the guide to designing rigorous RSA tests. For specific ideas, there are 25 ways to improve the CTR of your campaigns, and the PPC ad copy guide covers the writing side.
One caveat: sometimes expected CTR is low because the keyword doesn’t fit what you sell. If you bid on “free Excel course” and sell paid corporate training, no headline will fix that.
Ad relevance
Ad relevance measures how closely your ad matches the intent behind the search. Ad group structure has a direct impact here.
The common mistake is building broad ad groups where a single Responsive Search Ad covers 20, 30, sometimes 50 different keyword intents. The RSA tries to be relevant to everything and ends up specific to nothing. Google’s recommendations point the same way: match the language of your ads to user searches, group keywords into themes, and split ad groups that cover too much into several tighter ones (Google Ads Help).
Intent matters more than keyword presence. A searcher looking for “best CRM for small business” wants reassurance the product suits their size and budget. “CRM for Small Businesses. No Setup Costs.” addresses that intent. “Best CRM Software. Try Free.” doesn’t, even though it contains words from the query. Dynamic Keyword Insertion doesn’t solve this either: pasting in the search term isn’t the same as answering it.
Landing page experience
Landing page experience is Google’s assessment of how relevant and useful your page is for someone who clicked your ad. Google notes that information from any of its crawlers may be used to assess ad quality (Google Ads Help), so what’s on the page counts. Many advertisers underinvest here, partly because fixing a page takes more work than rewriting a headline, and partly because it feels like a CRO problem rather than a PPC one. For Quality Score purposes, it’s both.
What moves it, according to Google’s own recommendations: give people what they’re looking for, keep the message consistent from ad to page, make the page mobile friendly, and improve loading speed. If your ad promises “same-day delivery” and the page says “ships in 3-5 business days”, you’ve broken that consistency.
Take a typical example. A law firm runs a Search campaign on “employment tribunal solicitor”. The ad mentions no-win-no-fee representation and a free first consultation. The click lands on the firm’s general services page: a list of practice areas, partner bios, and a contact form near the footer. “Employment tribunal” appears once, in a sidebar. Nothing about no-win-no-fee. The visitor has to hunt for what the ad promised, and landing page experience reflects that.
The fix is a dedicated page that opens with the offer, explains the process, and puts the form on the first screen. The guide to B2B landing pages for qualified leads goes deeper into building pages like that.
Quality Score in automated campaigns: Smart Bidding and Performance Max
Smart Bidding, broad match, and AI Max
The argument goes: Smart Bidding sets bids at auction time, so quality is handled dynamically and the 1-10 score doesn’t matter. Part of that is true.
Smart Bidding does optimize “in every auction”, using signals such as device, location, time of day, and the actual search query (Google Ads Help). And Google says “it’s critical to use Smart Bidding with broad match” (Google Ads Help). Search term matching in AI Max for Search campaigns goes further: it expands your keywords “using broad match and keywordless technology”.
Now combine that with how Quality Score is calculated (exact searches only). In a broad match or AI Max setup, many impressions come from related searches that aren’t an exact match for the keyword. The score describes a slice of your traffic, sometimes a small one. The search terms report and conversion rate by landing page will tell you more.
What doesn’t go away are the underlying signals. An ad that doesn’t answer the search or a page that doesn’t deliver on the ad still costs you, whether or not a score flags it. Weak landing pages also mean fewer conversions for the bidding algorithm to learn from.
Performance Max and Shopping
Performance Max has no Quality Score, and neither do Shopping campaigns. They don’t use keywords the way Search campaigns do, so there’s nothing to attach a keyword score to.
For Performance Max, the closest equivalent is Performance Max Ad Strength, rated from “Incomplete” through “Poor”, “Average”, and “Good” to “Excellent”. It measures whether an asset group has enough breadth and variety of assets. Google reports that “advertisers who improve their Performance Max Ad Strength to ‘Excellent’ notice, on average, 6% more conversions.” For structuring asset groups properly, see the Performance Max for ecommerce guide. Shopping has no equivalent rating. In my view, the closest practical signal there is product feed quality: accurate titles, attributes, and data.
Search and PMax often compete for the same users. Don’t use PMax as a reason to stop caring about ad and page quality on Search.
When a low Quality Score is a structure problem
A single keyword at 3 is a keyword problem. Dozens of 3s and 4s across the account with the same component flagged is an account architecture problem. These are the patterns I see most often in audits:
| Pattern in the account | Usual cause | What gets fixed |
|---|---|---|
| Ad relevance “Below average” across most of an ad group | The ad group mixes different intents under one ad | Split the group by theme and write ads per intent |
| Landing page experience “Below average” account-wide | All traffic goes to the homepage or a generic page, or the page is slow on mobile | Dedicated pages per service or category, consistent with the ads |
| Low expected CTR on generic keywords | Ads look like every competitor’s, or keywords don’t fit the offer | Sharpen the offer in the ad, or stop bidding on those searches |
| Lots of dashes and hundreds of low-traffic keywords | Over-fragmented account | Consolidate ad groups and keywords so there’s enough data |
Every fix here changes structure, messaging, or pages. Performance improves, and the score moves as a result. If you want to run that review yourself, the guide on how to audit your Google Ads account walks through the full process, and the complete guide to Google Ads mistakes covers the most common structural errors.
When the pattern repeats across the whole account, it’s usually faster to have someone rebuild structure, ads, and pages in one pass. That’s the work I do in my freelance Google Ads management service: Google Partner, CXL-trained, hands-on in the account with no middle layer.
A practical Quality Score diagnostic: run this on your account today
This is the workflow I use when auditing accounts.
- Add the columns. In the Search keywords view, enable Quality Score and its three components. To compare periods, add the historical versions, such as “Quality Score (hist.)”.
- Sort by cost, not by score. A keyword at QS 3 with ten impressions a month can wait. One at QS 4 that takes a big share of spend is where you start.
- Check which component is “Below average”. That tells you the type of problem: ad, structure, or page.
- Look for patterns. If the same component fails across an ad group, a campaign, or the whole account, the cause is shared. Fix it once, not keyword by keyword.
- Skip the dashes (not enough exact-search data).
- Give it time. The score is historical and compares 90 days of data, so a change to an ad or page won’t show up the next day. Judge it weeks later.
Cross-check with the search terms report every time. Because Quality Score only looks at exact searches, that report is where you see which real queries are paying for your clicks.
If expected CTR is below average, the issue is your ad relative to competitors. Review what else shows for that search with Google’s Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool. Are your headlines specific to the intent, or leading with a generic call to action?
If ad relevance is below average, the issue is usually structural. Is the keyword sitting in an ad group with others pulling in different directions? Tighten the group or write copy aligned to this keyword’s intent.
If landing page experience is below average, run the page through PageSpeed Insights and check mobile. Then check whether the page delivers what the ad promises. A broader Google Analytics audit often surfaces the same page problems in engagement data.
What won’t help: raising bids (bids are a separate Ad Rank factor), or chasing a 10 on competitive head terms.
Frequently asked questions
Does Quality Score affect how much I pay per click?
Not directly. Google states that Quality Score is not an input in the ad auction. What does count is ad and landing page quality, which Google evaluates at every auction as part of Ad Rank, and Google says higher quality ads can often lead to lower CPCs. Quality Score measures the same three areas historically, so it works as a proxy for those signals.
How is Quality Score calculated, and how much does each component weigh?
Google combines expected CTR, ad relevance, and landing page experience, based on historical impressions for exact searches of your keyword. It doesn’t publish weightings. Figures you see online come from third-party models such as Adalysis’s; Google publishes none.
Does Quality Score still matter with Smart Bidding?
Yes, but as a diagnostic. Smart Bidding sets bids at auction time using real-time signals, not the 1-10 score. The underlying factors (ad relevance, landing page quality, expected CTR) still shape your results. With broad match, remember the score only covers exact searches of the keyword, so check the search terms report too.
Why does my keyword show a dash instead of a Quality Score?
There haven’t been enough searches that exactly match that keyword to calculate a score. It isn’t a penalty and it’s common on low-volume keywords.
Does changing to exact match improve Quality Score?
No. Google says Quality Score is based on exact searches of your keyword, so changing match types won’t impact it. Match types do change which real searches trigger your ads, which matters for performance. The guide to Google Ads keyword match types covers that.
What is a good Quality Score?
Google doesn’t publish a target score or industry averages. A practical standard: your highest-spend keywords should have all three components at “Average” or “Above average”. Anything “Below average” on a keyword that spends real money is where the work is.
What is Ad Strength, and is it the same as Quality Score?
No. Ad Strength rates a responsive search ad before launch (Poor, Average, Good, Excellent) based on the variety and relevance of its headlines and descriptions. Quality Score rates a keyword after launch, based on historical impressions. Google says Ad Strength doesn’t directly influence whether your ad can serve.
Is a Quality Score of 10 worth chasing?
Rarely. Branded and very specific keywords often score high naturally. On competitive head terms, forcing the score up usually costs more effort than it returns. Fix the component that’s below average on your highest-spend keywords first.
If you’d rather go through your account together, you can book a 30-minute call. We’ll look at your Quality Score components, campaign structure, and landing pages, and you’ll leave with a clear list of what to fix first.
Sources
All retrieved September 2026.
- About Quality Score for Search campaigns - Google Ads Help
- About Ad Rank - Google Ads Help
- 5 ways to use Quality Score to improve your performance - Google Ads Help
- Expected clickthrough rate: Definition - Google Ads Help
- About keyword matching options - Google Ads Help
- About Smart Bidding - Google Ads Help
- About Performance Max Ad Strength - Google Ads Help
- About Ad Strength for responsive search ads - Google Ads Help
- How AI Max for Search campaigns works - Google Ads Help
- Google Ads Quality Score points model - Adalysis
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