All terms
— Google Ads
Quality Score
Quality Score is Google’s 1-10 diagnostic rating of keyword relevance, built from expected CTR, ad relevance, and landing page experience. Higher quality effectively discounts your CPCs.
— In practice
The auction ranks ads by bid × quality, so a genuinely more relevant ad can outrank a higher bidder while paying less per click. That makes relevance work — tighter keyword-to-ad-to-page alignment — a structural cost advantage rather than a cosmetic exercise.
Treat the visible 1-10 as a diagnostic, not a KPI: chasing the number directly (rather than the relevance it proxies) optimizes the thermometer instead of the temperature.
Want to know what yours is?
The free audit reads your actual account and computes the numbers behind every one of these definitions — no generic benchmarks.
Run the free audit