Broad Match Modifier

Broad Match Modifier, written with a plus sign in front of each modified term (+running +shoes), required every marked word to appear somewhere in the query, in any order, while leaving unmarked words free to vary or drop out entirely. It sat between phrase match and broad match in the old three-tier system: tighter than broad because it enforced the presence of specific words, looser than phrase because it did not care about word order or adjacency.

Google retired BMM as a creatable match type in July 2021 and folded its behavior into phrase match. Every keyword that was running as BMM at that time was automatically converted to run as phrase match going forward, and no new BMM keywords can be created through any interface, including the API, Google Ads Editor, or bulk uploads. This was part of a broader move toward meaning-based matching across all keyword types rather than the older literal-string and marked-term systems, and it happened alongside the same rewrite that made phrase match itself wider than it used to be.

The setting does not interact with anything in a live account today because it no longer exists as an active mechanism - there is no BMM toggle, no BMM bid adjustment, nothing to configure. Where it still matters is entirely retrospective: old account documentation, saved agency playbooks, training materials, and spreadsheet templates from before mid-2021 often still reference BMM as if it were a current option, and this is why the term keeps surfacing in audits and onboarding conversations years after the sunset. Certification study guides and older courses can also lag behind, which means newer practitioners sometimes learn BMM as a theoretical concept without ever realizing it has no live counterpart to practice on.

The mistake advertisers and even some agencies make is inheriting an account with keywords still displaying the plus-sign syntax (+emergency +plumber) and assuming those keywords are doing something distinct from the phrase-match keywords sitting next to them. They are not - the plus signs are cosmetic remnants of the old naming convention, and the keyword now behaves exactly like any phrase-match keyword written today. A second, subtler mistake is assuming the keyword's traffic profile has stayed the same since 2021 just because the text never changed; phrase match's meaning-based matching has continued to evolve, so a +keyword from five years ago can be pulling a noticeably different and generally broader query mix than it did on the day it converted.

In reporting, there is nothing BMM-specific left to read - any keyword still labeled with plus signs should be evaluated using the same search terms report and the same match-type logic you would apply to phrase match. If you are auditing an inherited account, the practical step is to strip the plus-sign formatting for clarity (it changes nothing functionally) and run the standard phrase-match review: pull the search terms report, check for drift, and rebuild the negative list against current traffic rather than whatever negative list was built around 2021-era assumptions.