Quality Score is a 1-10 diagnostic rating Google gives each keyword, built from expected CTR, ad relevance and landing page experience. You can't set it directly — it's a symptom, not a lever — but it feeds into Ad Rank, so a low score means you pay more per click for the same position.
Start a conversationQuality Score is a 1-10 rating Google Ads assigns to every keyword in your account, visible as a column you can add to the keywords view. It’s calculated in real time and recalculated constantly, using data from the last 90 days of that keyword’s activity.
The number itself isn’t the important part. What matters is what it’s built from and what it does once it exists. Quality Score is Google’s way of estimating, for a given keyword, how likely your ad is to be a good match for the person searching it — and it uses that estimate to decide how much you pay and where your ad lands, not to decide whether you deserve to rank higher on some abstract merit scale.
Quality Score is not a ranking factor you optimise directly, and it isn’t something Google rewards for its own sake. It’s a diagnostic readout of how your expected CTR, ad relevance and landing page are already performing. Chasing the number itself — rewriting ad copy purely to nudge a 6 to a 7 — treats the symptom, not the cause. Fix the three inputs and the score moves on its own; it’s not the other way round.
Quality Score’s real mechanism runs through Ad Rank. Every time your keyword is eligible to trigger an ad, Google calculates Ad Rank as (roughly) your bid multiplied by Quality Score and other auction-time signals, then ranks all eligible advertisers by that figure. Your position in the auction, and the price you actually pay for the click, both come out of that calculation — not from your bid alone.
The practical effect: two advertisers can bid the same amount on the same keyword and pay meaningfully different prices per click, because the one with the higher Quality Score needs a lower Ad Rank contribution from their bid to reach the same position. A poor Quality Score doesn’t just sit there as a bad number on a report — it directly inflates what you pay to appear in the same place a better-matched advertiser reaches more cheaply.
The three component ratings — below average, average, above average — that sit alongside the headline 1-10 score are often more actionable than the score itself, because they tell you which of the three mechanisms is actually the problem. A keyword with a low score dragged down by poor landing page experience needs a different fix to one dragged down by weak ad relevance, even if the final number looks identical.
It’s also worth remembering Quality Score is reported at the search-network keyword level and doesn’t directly apply to Shopping, Display or Performance Max in the same form, so it’s not a universal health check across an entire account — it’s specifically a Search keyword diagnostic.
Not automatically. A keyword can have a low Quality Score and still be profitable if the cost per click it produces still delivers acceptable cost per conversion. It’s worth investigating because it usually signals you’re paying more than a better-matched advertiser would for the same position, but it’s not, on its own, a reason to panic.
Sometimes, if the underlying issue is genuinely ad relevance — the copy doesn’t reflect the keyword’s intent. But if the real issue is landing page experience or an expected CTR problem caused by broad, loosely themed ad groups, rewriting ad copy alone won’t move the score much, because you haven’t touched the component that’s actually holding it down.
It improves your Ad Rank relative to your bid, which generally lowers the price needed to reach a given position compared to a lower-scoring competitor bidding the same amount. It doesn’t set an absolute price — the auction is still competitive, and a highly contested keyword can be expensive even at a Quality Score of 10.
Because expected CTR is judged relative to other advertisers competing for that keyword, and ad relevance and landing page experience are specific to your own ad copy and page. Two businesses bidding on an identical keyword will have different scores if their ads and landing pages aren’t equally well matched to that search.
The 1-10 Quality Score column is a Search keyword-level metric. PMax and Shopping don’t expose the same score, though the underlying principles — relevance between what you show and what the searcher wants, and a landing experience that matches intent — still influence performance in those campaign types even without a visible number.
It’s recalculated continuously using a rolling window of recent data, so it can shift within days of a genuine change to ad relevance, landing page or click behaviour. It won’t move meaningfully from a single day of unusual traffic — it reflects a pattern over the recent window, not a one-off event.
I've gone through plenty of accounts where the headline number looked fine but was masking a landing page mismatch, or where wasted spend traced straight back to broad ad groups Google was quietly penalising. Start a conversation and I'll give you an honest read on what's really happening in yours.
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