Google rolled out negative keywords that apply across the entire account, including Performance Max, which historically had no proper way to exclude junk. On paper it is one of the simplest, highest-return tools the platform has shipped in years.

In practice, very few of the accounts we audit have actually used it. The old habit of managing negatives campaign by campaign lingers, and the account-level list sits empty while budget keeps leaking to searches that were never going to convert.

This is the kind of thing an audit is built to catch. It is not clever or complicated. It is a tool that exists, a few minutes of work, and real money saved every month that nobody got around to setting up. The tool is there. The discipline is not.