Broad Match vs Phrase Match: How Wide to Buy

A match type tells Google how closely a search has to match your keyword before your ad can enter the auction. Broad match is the loosest. Google's own example: the broad keyword low carb diet plan can show on searches for carb free foods, mediterranean diet books, and how to cut carbs for beginners. To pick matches, broad may also use the searcher's recent searches, your landing page and assets, and the ad group's other keywords.

Phrase match shows on searches that include the meaning of your keyword. The meaning can be implied, and the search can be a more specific version of it. Word order still counts where it changes meaning. Google's example: "moving services NYC to Boston" covers "affordable moving services NYC to Boston" and "NYC corporate moving services to Boston", but not someone moving from Boston to New York City (Google's phrase match update page).

Older guides get two things wrong. Broad, not phrase, is Google's default for every keyword. And broad match modifier (the old +keyword syntax) is gone: Google folded it into phrase match between February and July 2021, and old BMM keywords now serve as phrase. Today's phrase match is wider than the pre-2021 version and slightly narrower than BMM was.

Close variants (plurals, misspellings, reworded searches) work differently again, and the exact match vs phrase match comparison covers them in detail.

Google Ads has a campaign-level setting called broad match keywords. Turning it on converts every phrase and exact keyword in the campaign to broad, and it only works with conversion-based Smart Bidding. On April 15, 2026, Google announced that campaigns using this setting would upgrade to AI Max for Search from September 2026, with search term matching turned on by default. Google expected all eligible upgrades to finish by the end of September. PPC Land reports that a Google Ads email on August 5, 2026 confirmed a September 1 start, and that for accounts that never enabled the setting, nothing changes.

Search term matching in AI Max uses broad match plus asset-based and landing page-based technology to decide where ads show. For a small account, three rules matter: it does not work with manual CPC, it respects your negative keywords, and Google says AI Max won't be effective if the campaign is limited by budget.

On results, Google claims (April 2026) that AI Max campaigns using the full feature set (search term matching, text customization and final URL expansion) see an average of 7% more conversions or conversion value at a similar CPA or ROAS than search term matching alone. That is Google's own 2026 figure, and PPC Land notes it excludes retail advertisers. We found no independent study we could read in full that confirms or contradicts it.

Google's own numbers are old. Its November 2020 post said advertisers who switched phrase and BMM keywords to broad in Target CPA campaigns could see 25% more conversions, and 12% more conversion value under Target ROAS (Google internal data, July 2020). That compared broad to phrase and BMM as they worked before the 2021 change, so it says little about today's phrase match.

The two largest recent third-party datasets point in different directions on phrase. Adalysis (September 2025, 16,825 non-brand Search campaigns over three months) found phrase had higher click-through and conversion rates than broad but worse CPA and ROAS overall, which the authors put down to phrase bids being set too high. Optmyzr (published May 2026, February 2026 data from 30,000 accounts) called phrase "the most consistent overperformer" and described broad as a bet on the algorithm. Optmyzr also reports that broad's share of spend has climbed since 2022 while exact's fell. Its text is inconsistent on which type is biggest by spend, so treat only the trend as reported.

Neither study is independent: each is one company's dataset, and Adalysis notes that smaller advertisers tend to use broad, which skews its manual CPC figures. Read the split below as two vendors' data, not a settled answer.

Google publishes no minimum number of conversions for broad match. The figure people quote, 30 conversions, comes from Google's Smart Bidding guidance, which says to judge a bid strategy over a period with at least 30 conversions, such as a month (50 for Target ROAS). That is a rule for reading results, not a gate for using broad. Still, if your campaign gets fewer than 30 conversions a month, you can't tell within a month whether broad helped.

Work through these in order. The first "no" points you to phrase.

A keyword is what you add to the ad group. A search term is what the person actually typed. The search terms report shows the searches that triggered your ads, and it is where broad match either earns its keep or shows its waste. You don't need a paid tool for this check; the report plus a spreadsheet does it.

One limit: Google leaves out search terms without enough query activity for privacy reasons, so you won't see every search you paid for. Judge the share you can see. Beginner accounts lose money in the same few places, and why Google Ads wastes a beginner's first $500 walks through them.

Negative keywords are searches you block. They follow their own rules, which the 2021 phrase change did not touch. The big one: negatives don't match close variants. If you add the negative "flowers", your ad is blocked on "red flowers" but can still show on "red flower" (Google's negative keyword page). Casing and misspellings are covered automatically; plurals and synonyms are not.

Broad match reaches more wordings than phrase, so expect to add more negatives, including plurals and synonyms, after you widen. Google says AI Max also respects negative keywords.

As of October 23, 2026: Google publishes no minimum conversion count for broad match. Google's help page for the campaign-level broad match setting no longer shows the September notice, so we could not confirm that every eligible campaign finished upgrading. A July 2024 report (uSERP, citing Search Engine Land) said broad match was switched on by default for new Search campaigns; we found no Google statement on that. We found no Google comparison of broad and phrase performance since the 2021 phrase update. Two AI Max figures circulate through PPC Land summaries (about 35% lower ROAS in a retail analysis, and 99% of impressions with zero conversions in one agency's accounts). We could not read the original studies, so we left them out.