If you run Google Ads for a cybersecurity company, a cybersecurity negative keyword list is the highest-return hour of work available to you, and almost nobody does it properly. Somewhere between 40% and 60% of search budget in this category reaches people who could never buy: students, job seekers, practitioners looking for a free tool, and researchers writing a paper.
This post is the list I apply on every account I rebuild. It is organized into 8 categories, each with a recommended match type, and it ends with the part most published lists leave out entirely: the do-not-negate list of queries that look like junk and are actually your best buyers.
Copy it, read it, then prune it. Applying it blind is its own kind of expensive mistake, and I will show you exactly where.
Table of contents
- Why cybersecurity accounts leak more than other B2B categories
- How to apply this list
- The 8 categories
- Match-type quick reference
- The do-not-negate list
- Keeping the list alive
- What to do after you apply it
- Common questions
Why cybersecurity accounts leak more than other B2B categories
Every paid search account wastes some budget. Cybersecurity wastes more, and for a structural reason worth understanding before you paste anything.
Search demand in security is dominated by people who want a job in it, not a product from it. Run any category term through a keyword tool and the surrounding queries fill up with salary questions, certification paths, and “how to become” phrasings. That population is enormous, it clicks readily, and it costs you money on every impression you let through.
The practitioner community is unusually active online. Security professionals search constantly for payloads, CVEs, writeups, lab environments and command syntax. They are technically your audience’s colleagues. They are not your buyers, and they will happily click a vendor ad while researching something unrelated to purchasing.
The category has a large free and open-source layer. Someone searching for a free vulnerability scanner is not a lead for a commercial platform, and the overlap in language between the free tier of the market and the enterprise tier is close to total.
Stack those three and you get accounts where the majority of spend never had a chance. Worse, a lot of that traffic converts on a form, because a curious person will trade an email address for a report. Your cost per lead looks fine and your pipeline stays empty.
I wrote separately about what counts as wasted ad spend and how to size your own number. This post is the fix.
How to apply this list
Three decisions before you paste.
Apply at the account level as a shared negative keyword list. In Google Ads, build these as shared lists under Tools, then apply the list to every campaign. Doing it campaign by campaign guarantees drift, because in three months you will add a campaign and forget. Google’s documentation on negative keyword lists covers the mechanics.
Match type matters more than the words. A broad negative on jobs blocks any query containing the word “jobs” anywhere. That is what you want for career traffic. A phrase negative is narrower and safer for terms that could appear inside a legitimate buyer query. Each section below names its default.
Keep every negative to 10 words or fewer and 80 characters or fewer. That is a platform constraint and it will silently reject anything longer. If match types are unfamiliar, what negative keywords are covers them before you start.
One more thing. Read every section before you apply it. Section 3 and section 4 both contain terms that are buyer signals in some accounts, and I flag each one inline. The 20 minutes you spend reading is what separates this from the giant scraped lists that quietly block your best queries.
The 8 categories
1. Jobs, careers and recruiting (broad negatives)
The single biggest junk source in cybersecurity search. These are people searching to get hired, not to buy.
jobs, job, career, careers, hiring, hire, recruiter, recruiting, recruitment, resume, cv, cover letter, interview, interview questions, apply, application, vacancy, vacancies, internship, intern, entry level, junior, remote job, work from home, salary, salaries, pay, wage, how much do, how to become, become a, is a good career, career path, career change, bootcamp, linkedin jobs, indeed, glassdoor, ziprecruiter, upwork, freelance, freelancer, contractor jobs, analyst jobs, engineer jobs, soc analyst, pentester job
If you apply only one section, apply this one. In most accounts it accounts for the largest single block of recoverable spend.
2. Education, courses and certifications (broad negatives)
Learners rather than buyers, and the volume here is enormous.
course, courses, class, classes, training, certification, certifications, certificate, cert, exam, study, study guide, syllabus, curriculum, degree, masters, bachelors, phd, university, college, school, bootcamp, learn, learning, tutorial, tutorials, lesson, lessons, udemy, coursera, pluralsight, cybrary, tryhackme, hack the box, hackthebox, oscp, ceh, cissp, comptia, security+, sec+, gsec, giac, pnpt, practice exam, cheat sheet, roadmap to
One caution. If you sell security awareness training or a certification product, most of this section is your market. Skip it entirely and negate only the job-seeking terms in section 1.
3. Free, DIY, open-source and cheap (mostly broad negatives)
Non-budget intent.
free, free tool, free tools, free version, open source, opensource, github, gitlab, download, free download, crack, cracked, nulled, torrent, diy, do it yourself, build your own, homemade, cheap, cheapest, low cost, budget, for free, no cost, template, script, scripts, spreadsheet, excel template
Read this before applying. If you run a free trial, a free demo or a free assessment as a buyer offer, do not negate free broadly. You will block your own campaign. In that case, apply only free tool, free download, open source, github, crack and torrent, and add them at the campaign level rather than the account level.
4. Informational, how-to and definitions (broad negatives)
Research intent. Real people, genuinely interested, months or years from a purchase decision if ever.
what is, what are, meaning, definition, define, explained, how does, how to, how do, guide, guides, beginners, beginner, for dummies, 101, basics, introduction, examples, example of, checklist, types of, list of, difference between, wiki, wikipedia, reddit, quora, forum, blog, news, statistics, stats, report pdf, whitepaper pdf, template pdf
The big exception, and it is expensive to get wrong. I have deliberately left vs and versus out of that list. A query like “[competitor] vs [your product]” is one of the highest-intent searches anyone will ever type about your category. Blanket-negating vs is one of the most common and most costly mistakes I find in inherited accounts.
Handle it this way instead. Negate vs and versus inside your informational or awareness campaigns only, and run a dedicated comparison campaign that bids on those terms directly. Same for difference between, which is worth testing rather than assuming.
5. Practitioners, hobbyists and researchers (phrase negatives)
Security professionals doing their job or their hobby. These are your buyers’ colleagues, which makes them feel like the right audience. They are not evaluating a platform.
cheat sheet, payload, payloads, exploit db, exploitdb, cve, poc, proof of concept, writeup, write up, walkthrough, ctf, capture the flag, lab, labs, homelab, practice, sandbox, test environment, research paper, academic, thesis, whitepaper, methodology, tools list, awesome list, commands, command line, syntax, documentation, docs, api docs, cheatsheet
Use phrase negatives here rather than broad. Several of these words appear inside legitimate buyer queries, and precision matters more than reach in this section.
6. Consumer and personal use (broad negatives)
Home users. Wrong buyer entirely for enterprise and mid-market security.
antivirus, for home, home use, personal, for my pc, for laptop, for android, for iphone, for mac, parental, kids, family, vpn for netflix, best vpn, free vpn, password manager free, identity theft, credit monitoring, router, wifi, home network, small office, for students, for individuals
Prune this if you genuinely serve SMB. Terms like small office and for individuals are your market in that case. Keep the section intact for enterprise and mid-market products.
7. Job-function and role-seeker modifiers (phrase negatives)
These catch role-title queries that are career-seeking rather than buying, which section 1 misses because they do not contain an obvious job word.
analyst salary, engineer salary, job description, roles and responsibilities, day in the life, what does a, skills needed, requirements to become, certifications needed
8. Unrelated queries and brand confusion (account-specific)
This section you build yourself, because it depends entirely on your product name. If your product shares a name with a movie, a game, a consumer brand or a stock ticker, you are paying for that traffic right now.
The pattern to look for:
movie, game, lyrics, stock, stock price, ticker, careers page
Three that need a decision rather than a paste. login, support and customer service are usually existing customers rather than prospects. Blocking them account-wide can cut off people trying to reach you. The better move is to negate them in prospecting campaigns only and let brand campaigns serve them.
Match-type quick reference
| Section | Default match type | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Jobs and careers | Broad negative | Block any query containing the term |
| 2. Education and certifications | Broad negative | High-volume learner traffic |
| 3. Free and DIY | Broad, with buyer-offer exceptions | Non-budget intent |
| 4. Informational and how-to | Broad, except vs | Research intent |
| 5. Practitioners | Phrase negative | Precision, avoids blocking buyer queries |
| 6. Consumer and personal | Broad negative | Wrong buyer |
| 7. Role-seeker modifiers | Phrase negative | Catches what section 1 misses |
| 8. Brand confusion | Exact or phrase, per account | Avoids over-blocking |
The do-not-negate list
This is the part that matters most and the part scraped lists never include. These queries look adjacent to junk and are among the highest-intent searches in your account. Protect them.
pricing and cost when attached to a product (“[product] pricing”, “[category] cost”) are buyer comparison queries. Somebody researching price is further along than somebody reading a definition.
demo, free trial, free demo and free assessment are your own offers. Negating free broadly kills all four.
[competitor] alternative is a person actively looking to leave a product they currently pay for. In compliance especially, this is frequently the single most valuable query available and it is routinely unbid.
[competitor] vs is a person choosing between named vendors.
best [category] for [use case] is a shortlist-building query.
enterprise, platform, vendor, solution are qualifying words that signal a business buyer rather than an individual.
Category terms with genuine commercial intent behind them, such as pentest as a service, PTaaS, soc 2 compliance software and compliance automation, belong in your campaigns rather than your negative list.
The rule underneath all of these: before you negate a term, ask whether a person with budget and a problem would plausibly type it. If yes, it belongs in a campaign, possibly a cheaper and better-targeted one than where it currently sits.
Keeping the list alive
A negative keyword list is never finished, and this is where most accounts quietly regress.
Search queries change every month. Your competitors launch, rebrand and get acquired. A new certification becomes popular and floods your category with learners. A conference talk makes an obscure term briefly popular. The list you paste today decays.
Mine the search terms report every cycle. It is the only report that shows you what people actually typed. Sort by cost, read the top queries, and promote new junk patterns into the shared list. This takes 20 minutes a month once the big blocks are handled. I walk through the specific method in how to find the negative keywords costing you most.
Keep the protect list current too. Every time you add a competitor to your comparison campaign, their name and its variants join the do-not-negate side of the ledger.
Watch for over-blocking. If impressions fall off a cliff after a bulk import, you blocked something you needed. The search terms report will not show you what you prevented, so the tell is a sudden volume drop in a campaign that was previously healthy.
What to do after you apply it
Applying this list will reduce your spend. That is the point, and it is also the part that surprises people. The first month usually shows lower cost, fewer clicks, fewer conversions and a better cost per qualified opportunity, because the conversions you lost were never going to become customers.
Which raises the question the negative list cannot answer on its own: how do you know which of the remaining conversions are real?
That requires your ad account to see what happened after the form, which means connecting your CRM back to Google Ads so bidding optimizes toward pipeline rather than form fills. A clean negative list stops you buying obvious junk. Conversion tracking that reaches into your CRM is what stops you buying the subtle junk.
Cutting the waste is the first half of the job. Making the remaining spend accountable is the second.
Common questions
How many negative keywords should an account have?
There is no target number and chasing one leads people to paste in lists they have not read. A well governed B2B account typically runs somewhere between 200 and 600 account-level negatives, most of which arrive in the first month and then grow slowly. What matters is whether the list is organized into themes you can reason about later. A list of 2,000 unsorted terms nobody can explain is harder to maintain than a list of 300 grouped into the 8 categories above.
Should negative keywords go at the account level or the campaign level?
Account level as a shared list, for anything that is junk everywhere. Job seekers and students are never going to buy from you, so those belong in a shared list applied to every campaign, including campaigns that do not exist yet. Reserve campaign-level negatives for genuine exceptions, most commonly protecting a free-trial campaign from a broad free negative, or letting brand campaigns serve on login and support while prospecting campaigns block them.
Will adding negative keywords reduce my traffic?
Yes, and that is the point. Expect clicks, impressions and often conversions to fall in the first month. The number that should improve is cost per qualified opportunity, because the conversions you lost were people who were never going to buy. This is worth flagging to whoever reads your reporting before you apply the list, since a report showing lower volume across the board reads as a problem if nobody was warned.
Do negative keywords work in Performance Max?
Support has changed several times, so check current documentation rather than trusting any blog post on this. The practical point that has stayed true is that Performance Max matches queries more loosely than a tightly-run Search campaign, so a negative list protects you less there than you would expect. If a large share of your budget sits in Performance Max and your lead quality dropped after you turned it on, the negative list is only part of the fix.
Applying this list is the easy half. Knowing which of your existing queries to protect rather than block is the half that costs people money, and it needs a look at your actual account. Book a BADASS Discovery Call at bad2badass.com. If the rebuild is bigger than a list, that is what the BAD-ectomy is for.