Google Ads Quality Score Explained
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Quality Score is Google's 1-10 estimate, for each keyword, of how relevant and useful your ad and landing page are compared with other advertisers'. It combines three components: expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. Google calls it a diagnostic tool: it points to what to improve, but it isn't used in the ad auction itself. This explainer is part of our paid advertising guide.
It covers what each component measures, how Quality Score relates to Ad Rank, why some keywords show no score, and how to act on a low one.
Key takeaways
- Quality Score is a 1-10 diagnostic for each keyword, not a target to chase.
- It combines expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance and landing page experience.
- Each component is rated against other advertisers on the exact same search.
- Google says it isn't used in the auction; Ad Rank is.
- Use low components to decide whether to fix keywords, ads or landing pages.
What Quality Score measures
Quality Score appears in the keyword table of a Search campaign, once you add the column. Each keyword gets a number from 1 to 10. A higher number means Google judges your ad and landing page to be more relevant to someone searching that keyword than other advertisers' are.
The comparison is the key part. Quality Score isn't an absolute grade of your ad. It's a relative one: how your ads perform against other advertisers whose ads showed for the exact same search over the last 90 days. A keyword in a crowded market can score low even with a decent ad, if others' ads are stronger.
Google is direct about how to treat it. Its help says Quality Score isn't a key performance indicator, and shouldn't be optimized or added up with the rest of your data. It's a way to find where improvements might help.
The three components
Quality Score is built from three components. Each one is rated Above average, Average or Below average, and the ratings tell you more than the single number does.
| Component | What it measures | If it's low, look at |
|---|---|---|
| Expected clickthrough rate | How likely your ad is to be clicked when shown | The offer, the wording and the call to action |
| Ad relevance | How closely the ad matches the search's intent | Keyword grouping and ad text |
| Landing page experience | How relevant and useful the page is after the click | Page content, consistency, speed and mobile use |
The components point to different fixes. A low expected clickthrough rate usually means the ad isn't compelling for the searches it shows on. Low ad relevance often means an ad group mixes keywords that one ad can't answer. A low landing page rating means the page doesn't follow through on what the ad promised.
Quality Score and Ad Rank
The two are easy to confuse. Ad Rank is what Google calculates in each auction to decide whether your ad can show and where. Google lists many factors: your bid, the quality of your ads and landing page, minimum thresholds, how competitive the auction is, the context of the search, and the expected impact of your assets.
Quality Score isn't one of those inputs. Google says plainly that it isn't used at auction time to determine Ad Rank. It's a summary, built after the fact, of how your ads have fared on quality.
They are linked, though. The same things that raise Quality Score, relevant ads and useful landing pages, also feed the quality part of Ad Rank. Google says higher quality ads can lead to lower prices and better positions. So improving the components helps the auction, even though the score itself never enters it.
Why some keywords show no score
A dash in the Quality Score column means there aren't enough searches that exactly match the keyword to calculate a score. Quality Score is based on past impressions for exact searches of your keyword, so a keyword that rarely gets those has no score yet.
That has two consequences. First, changing a keyword's match type doesn't change its Quality Score, because the calculation always uses exact searches. Second, a broad match keyword can show the same score as an exact match version of the same keyword in the ad group, because they share the same exact-search data.
If many of your keywords show no score, the account may be spread across too many low-volume keywords. Grouping them better, as described in our guide to Google Ads account structure, helps the data build up.
What Quality Score leaves out
Google lists factors that affect ad quality but aren't captured by Quality Score. They include the device people search on, their location, the time of day, and the assets shown with your ad, such as sitelinks. In the live auction, those can change how your ad performs from one search to the next.
So Quality Score is an average view. A keyword with a middling score might do well on mobile in the evening and poorly elsewhere. Use it alongside the metrics that matter more: clickthrough rate, conversion rate, cost per conversion and the searches the keyword actually matched.
How to act on a low score
Start with the component, not the number. If ad relevance is low, split ad groups so each one's ads can match its keywords closely. If expected clickthrough rate is low, make the offer clearer, be more specific, and test a stronger call to action. We cover ad writing in how to write Google search ads.
If landing page experience is low, send people to the page that matches the search, keep the message consistent from ad to page, and make sure it loads fast and works on a phone. Google notes the page doesn't need to repeat the search word for word. It needs to give people what they came for.
Then give the changes time. Components are compared over a 90-day window, so scores move gradually. Watch conversions and cost per conversion at the same time, because a more specific ad can lower clicks while raising the quality of leads.
If you'd rather have keywords, ads and landing pages reviewed together, our in-house ads team runs paid search alongside the ad creative.
Common questions
What is a good Quality Score in Google Ads?
Google doesn't name a target number, and it advises against optimizing Quality Score for its own sake. Higher is better, because it means your ad and page look more relevant than other advertisers' for that search. In practice, look at the three components: any rated Below average shows where to work, and Above average shows what to protect.
Does changing a keyword's match type change its Quality Score?
No. Google says Quality Score is based on past impressions for exact searches of your keyword, so switching match type doesn't change how it's calculated. Broadening a match type can help a keyword enter more auctions and gather enough data to get a score, but the score itself still comes from searches that exactly match the keyword.
How often does Quality Score update?
Google calculates the components from recent auctions, comparing your ads with others on the same search over the last 90 days, so scores move as new data comes in. You can see past values in the historical Quality Score columns and segment the keyword table by day. Judge changes over weeks, not single days, because one day's data is thin.
Is Quality Score used outside Search campaigns?
Quality Score as a 1-10 number is a Search campaign diagnostic, reported for keywords. Other campaign types, such as Display, Video and Performance Max, don't report it in the same way. Ad quality still matters in those campaigns, but you judge it through their own reports, such as asset performance, rather than a keyword score.