What Is Quality Score in Google Ads?

Google scores each keyword from 1 to 10, and it builds that score from three parts. Expected clickthrough rate is how likely your ad is to be clicked when it shows. Ad relevance is how closely your ad matches the intent behind the search. Landing page experience is how relevant and useful your page is to the people who click it.

The score sits at the keyword level, and that is the useful bit. You read it against the keyword that is actually spending your money, not against the account as a whole.

Google is blunt about this one. Its own help page says Quality Score is not an input in the ad auction. Google calls it a diagnostic tool instead, for spotting how the ads showing for your keywords affect the user experience. So chasing a 10 out of 10 is not a strategy. Use the score to find which keywords are dragging, then go and fix the ad or the page behind them.

There is a second catch if you sell products. Shopping campaigns have no keywords at all, so there is no Quality Score to read in them. Google matches your products off your feed instead. If most of your budget sits in Shopping or Performance Max, your product data is doing the job that Quality Score reports on in Search.

The three parts point at three jobs. Tighter ad groups lift ad relevance. Ad copy that echoes the words people actually type lifts expected clickthrough rate. A landing page that shows the thing they searched for, in stock and priced, lifts landing page experience. None of that is clever. It is just work that nobody does weekly.

Scaley AI does the waste half of that loop. It reads the account 24/7, mines bad search terms every day rather than every quarter, and hands you the exclusion with the evidence attached. It writes nothing to your account until you approve it. We make Scaley, so take that with a pinch of salt.

Where something else wins. If you want to build your own if-this-then-that rules, Optmyzr publishes Rule Engine Automations on every plan tier, and Scaley has no rule builder in it at all. And on a small Search account, reading the score yourself for one honest hour a week beats any tool. Buy software when there are more keywords than you can hold in your head.