Google Ads Quality Score, explained.

The short answer

Google Ads Quality Score is a 1-to-10 rating that determines how much you pay per click and how often your ad shows. It is calculated from three sub-scores: expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. A high Quality Score (8 to 10) can reduce your effective cost-per-click by 50 percent or more compared to a low Quality Score (1 to 4). It is the single biggest non-bid lever in any Google Ads account.

What Quality Score actually is

Quality Score is Google's estimate of how useful your ad will be to a user who sees it. It is calculated at the keyword level, not at the campaign or account level. You'll see a single number from 1 to 10 in the Quality Score column of the keyword view in Google Ads.

Behind that single number sit three component ratings, each marked as below average, average, or above average:

• Expected click-through rate. How likely Google thinks a user is to click your ad when shown for this keyword.
• Ad relevance. How closely your ad copy matches the keyword's search intent.
• Landing page experience. How relevant, fast, and easy to navigate your landing page is for the user who clicked.

Why Quality Score matters financially

Two reasons. First, your Ad Rank in the auction is calculated as bid times Quality Score. A bidder with a higher Quality Score wins the auction at a lower bid. Second, the actual price you pay per click is calculated as (next competitor's Ad Rank) divided by (your Quality Score) plus a small increment. Higher Quality Score, lower cost-per-click.

On a working keyword, the cost difference between a Quality Score of 4 and a Quality Score of 9 is often 60 to 70 percent. Same ad position, same conversion rate, materially different cost.

The three sub-scores, in detail

1 · Expected click-through rate

Google compares your ad's expected CTR to the average CTR for the same keyword in the same auction. If your ad is forecast to outperform the average, you get a good score. If it's forecast to underperform, you get a bad one.

What moves it: tighter keyword-to-ad relevance, more compelling ad copy, sitelinks and assets that increase click probability, longer ad history (newer ads start at "average").

2 · Ad relevance

Google checks whether your ad text contains the keyword, semantic variants of it, and language that matches the user's likely intent. A user searching "buy red shoes" gets a different ad relevance signal from an ad headlined "Premium Footwear" versus one headlined "Red Shoes Under £80, Free Delivery".

What moves it: keyword in the headline, intent-matched description, ad copy written for the exact search the user typed (not for the brand's preferred positioning).

3 · Landing page experience

Google judges the destination page on three factors: relevance to the ad (does the page deliver what the ad promised?), ease of navigation (is the next step obvious?), and load speed (Core Web Vitals).

What moves it: a dedicated landing page per ad theme, headline that restates the ad's promise, one primary CTA above the fold, fast loading, mobile-optimised. Generic homepages get worse Quality Score than dedicated landing pages, every time.

The structural mistakes that keep Quality Score low

• Too many keywords per ad group. If your ad group has 50 keywords, no single ad can be relevant to all of them. Break the group apart.
• One landing page for all campaigns. Sending every ad to the homepage hard-caps your landing page experience score. Build dedicated landing pages.
• Skipping the search terms report. Without weekly negatives, broad match destroys ad relevance over time.
• Ad copy written by the brand team for the brand team. Quality Score rewards search-intent-matched copy. The user's words beat the brand's words.
• Slow landing pages. Largest Contentful Paint above 2.5 seconds caps the LPE score. Performance budgets matter.
• Pausing low-CTR ads instead of fixing them. Quality Score has memory; pausing doesn't reset it. Improve the ad before disabling.

"Three ad groups, three landing pages, three rounds of negative keywords. Most accounts get from 4 to 8 in a quarter when these three things are done in sequence."

The 80/20 of Quality Score work

What about the historical Quality Score column?

Google Ads also shows historical Quality Score columns: last time the keyword had impressions, its score. These are informational, not actionable. The current score is what affects the auction.

How long it takes to move

Practical experience: ad copy changes and ad group restructures start showing improvement in Quality Score within 7 to 14 days. Landing page improvements take longer; Google needs to see enough clicks land on the new page to recalculate the LPE score. Plan on a full quarter to move a keyword from a 4 to an 8.

What to do this week

1. Add the three Quality Score columns to your keyword view in Google Ads.
2. Sort by spend descending. For each of the top 10 spenders, note the sub-score that's "below average".
3. Pick the worst-performing sub-score and fix it (rewrite ads, build landing page, restructure ad group, etc.). Don't try to fix all three at once on the same keyword.
4. Wait two weeks. Review.
5. Repeat.

Originally published December 2024. Refreshed May 2026 to reflect 2026 ad-rank changes and current Google Ads UI.