If you learned match types back when phrase match meant "these words, in this order," your mental model is years out of date. Google's own help documentation no longer describes match types in terms of words at all. It describes them in terms of meaning.
That one change explains most of the confusion business owners have when they open a search terms report and find their plumbing ads showed on "why is my water heater making noise." Nothing broke. The rules changed and nobody sent you a memo.
What Google says each match type does now
Straight from the Google Ads Help page on keyword matching options:
Broad match (no punctuation — water heater repair) shows ads on searches related to your keyword, including searches that don't contain the direct meaning of the keyword. Google also says it uses the searcher's recent search activity, the content of your landing pages and assets, and the other keywords in the ad group to decide what counts as related. Broad is the default match type assigned to any keyword you add without quotes or brackets.
Phrase match ("water heater repair") shows ads on searches that include the meaning of your keyword — and Google explicitly notes that the meaning can be implied. There is no word-order rule in the current definition.
Exact match ([water heater repair]) shows ads on searches with the same meaning or same intent as the keyword. Not the same words. The same meaning.
Read those three again and notice what's missing. No requirement that the search contains your keyword. No requirement about word order. The brackets and quotes still narrow things — exact is genuinely tighter than phrase, which is genuinely tighter than broad — but all three are now interpretations, not filters.
The match types nest, so stop duplicating keywords
Google states it plainly: a phrase match keyword reaches everything its exact match twin would reach, plus more. A broad keyword reaches everything phrase and exact would reach, plus more.
So the old habit of adding water heater repair, "water heater repair" and [water heater repair] to the same ad group accomplishes nothing. Google's docs say near-duplicate keywords get recognized as duplicates, the one with the higher Ad Rank is used, and you only have one bid in the auction anyway. It doesn't cost you extra — it just clutters the account and splits your reporting for no reason.
If you have the same term in multiple match types, keep the loosest one you're actually comfortable with and delete the rest.
Three changes that broke the old playbook
Broad match modifier is gone. The +keyword syntax was retired. You can't add new BMM keywords, and legacy ones still in accounts now behave as phrase match. Google's help page on the change says the current phrase match is more expansive than the old phrase match and slightly more restrictive than the old BMM. If your account was built on +water +heater +repair, you are running phrase match whether you meant to or not.
Close variants went semantic. Close variants used to mean misspellings and plurals. Google's documentation now lists singular and plural forms, acronyms, stem words (floor/flooring), abbreviations, accents, and variants with the same meaning. The Google Ads API even has separate reporting values for "exact match (close variant)" and "phrase match (close variant)" — which tells you how routine this matching is.
One practical wrinkle from the search terms report documentation: the match type shown for a search term may not be the match type of the keyword that triggered it, because broader keywords can match search terms in narrower ways. A broad keyword can produce a search term labelled "exact match" when the query happens to be identical.
Broad match got welded to Smart Bidding. Google's guidance isn't subtle here. Its own note says it's critical to use Smart Bidding with broad match, because every query is different and bids should reflect auction-time signals. That's not marketing fluff — it's a warning. Broad match on manual CPC means one bid applied to a semantic net you can't see the edges of.
Keyword prioritization decides more than your brackets do
Google publishes the order it uses when several keywords or Performance Max search themes could match one query:
- An exact match keyword identical to the search term wins over any broad or phrase keyword and over a Performance Max campaign.
- Phrase and broad keywords (including AI Max) or PMax search themes that are identical to the search term share the next priority level.
- Then AI-based relevance decides which ad group is most appropriate.
- Then Ad Rank breaks the tie.
That's why exact match still matters for the handful of terms you never want losing to another campaign — your brand name, your highest-margin emergency service. Note the word identical in the first two rules. For everything else, Google's AI is choosing your ad group, not your match type syntax.
Google also documents ineligibility conditions that can push a query to another campaign: a budget-limited Search campaign, a low search volume keyword, disapproved ads or landing pages. A local account starving a search campaign on a $20/day budget is quietly handing queries elsewhere.
The September 2026 upgrade to check today
This is the change most owners haven't seen. Google announced that starting September 2026, campaigns using the campaign-level broad match setting and campaigns using automatically created assets are automatically upgraded to AI Max, with search term matching enabled by default. Google said it expected eligible upgrades to conclude by the end of September. (The Dynamic Search Ads sunset was pushed back to February 2027 after advertiser feedback, but the broad match setting and ACA upgrades stayed on the September schedule.)
Why that matters: AI Max's search term matching, per Google's documentation, expands beyond your keywords using broad match and keywordless technology. Your keyword list becomes an intent signal rather than a boundary. Google's claimed benefit for the full AI Max feature suite is an average of 7% more conversions or conversion value at similar CPA/ROAS compared with using search term matching alone — that's Google internal data for non-Retail advertisers, so treat it as the vendor's number, not an independent benchmark.
Two things to do this week. Open the Settings tab of each Search campaign and check whether "Broad match keywords" or AI Max is on. Then go to your Keywords page, click Segment, and choose Search terms match type — AI Max now reports as its own match type, alongside broad, phrase, exact and the close-variant versions. If AI Max is spending and you didn't switch it on, you'll see it there.
Negatives are literal even though positives aren't
This asymmetry catches everyone. Google's negative keyword documentation says negatives don't match to close variants or other expansions. You have to add synonyms and singular/plural forms yourself. Casing and misspellings are handled automatically; nothing else is.
Google's own example: excluding the negative broad keyword flowers blocks "red flowers" but not "red flower."
So your positive keywords expand semantically and your negatives don't. That gap is where local budgets die — job seekers, DIY researchers, wholesale suppliers, neighbouring cities you don't serve, and adjacent trades you don't offer. There's one more quirk worth knowing: Google says a negative sitting past the 16th word of a long query may not apply at all.
We've covered negative keyword construction in depth in the negative keyword guide, so I won't repeat it here. The point for match types is this: loosening match type without tightening negatives first is just choosing to buy the wrong searches faster.
What to actually run in a local service account
A structure that holds up under the current rules:
- Exact match for your brand name and your two or three highest-value service terms, in their own tightly themed ad groups. Priority rule #1 is the only hard guarantee Google still gives you.
- Phrase match as the working default for service terms and service-plus-modifier terms. Understand that it now behaves closer to the old BMM than the old phrase match, and audit it accordingly.
- Broad match only when three conditions are true: conversion-based Smart Bidding, enough real conversion volume for that bidding to learn, and a negative list you've actively maintained for months. Otherwise it's an expensive experiment.
- Themed ad groups with matching landing pages. Google says broad match reads your landing pages, assets and the other keywords in the ad group. A page that clearly says "emergency water heater replacement in [city]" is a targeting instruction now, not just a conversion asset.
And this only works if your conversion data is honest. If Google is optimising toward form views or every phone click rather than real booked jobs, match type selection is rearranging deck chairs. Getting the whole sequence in the right order — tracking, then structure, then negatives, then controlled expansion — is what Launchpad walks through step by step.
The weekly twenty minutes
Every week: open the search terms report, add the match type and keyword columns, sort by cost, and read the terms that spent money with no conversion. Add negatives in the exact form you observed. Promote any query that converted twice into its own exact keyword. Segment by search terms match type once a month to see which bucket — exact, phrase, broad, close variant or AI Max — is actually paying for itself.
That's the whole job now. You no longer control which searches you buy by typing punctuation around keywords. You control it by what you exclude, what your landing pages say, and what you tell Google counts as a conversion.