Google Ads’ 1-to-10 rating of the quality and relevance of your keywords and ads.
Quality Score is a diagnostic in Google Ads, scored from 1 to 10, that estimates how relevant your ad, keyword and landing page are to a searcher. It is built from three components: expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing-page experience. Higher quality means better Ad Rank at a lower cost.
Quality Score itself is a reporting signal for optimisation, not the exact number used in the live auction. But the underlying quality it represents directly affects both the position your ad wins and the price you pay per click.
The three components each get a status of above average, average or below average. Because Ad Rank multiplies your bid by quality, improving these lets you rank higher and pay less than a competitor bidding more.
Sending all keywords to one generic landing page, cramming loosely related keywords into one ad group, or ignoring landing-page speed and relevance. Tight ad groups with matched copy and dedicated landing pages are what lift the score.
Quality Score is Google Ads' 1–10 rating of how relevant and useful your ads and landing pages are, and it directly affects both how much you pay and where you show. Because Ad Rank combines your bid with Quality Score, a high Quality Score lets you win better positions at lower cost per click — advertisers with strong Quality Scores routinely pay far less than competitors for the same placements. It is Google's mechanism for rewarding relevance over raw spend, which means improving it is usually the highest-ROI lever in a paid account.
Quality Score is built from three inputs, each of which points to a fix. Expected click-through rate reflects how likely your ad is to be clicked — improved with compelling, relevant ad copy. Ad relevance reflects how closely your ad matches the keyword's intent — improved with tightly-themed ad groups where the keyword appears in the ad. Landing-page experience reflects how relevant, fast and useful the destination is — improved by matching the landing page to the ad's promise and keeping it fast and easy to use. The unifying principle is alignment: keyword → ad → landing page should tell one consistent story.
Two advertisers compete for the same keyword. Advertiser A bids $5 with a Quality Score of 3; Advertiser B bids $4 with a Quality Score of 8. Because Ad Rank is bid × Quality Score, B (32) outranks A (15) despite bidding less, and B pays a lower actual CPC because Google rewards its relevance. Diagnosing A's low score points to fixes across the three components: the ad group is bloated and off-theme (poor ad relevance), the ads are generic (weak expected CTR), and the landing page is a slow, unfocused homepage (poor landing-page experience). Tightening the ad group around a small keyword set with the keyword in the ad, rewriting the ad to earn clicks, and matching a fast, relevant landing page to the ad's promise lifts A's Quality Score — and with it, better positions at lower cost. The example shows Quality Score is Google's mechanism for making relevance cheaper than brute-force bidding.
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The average amount you pay each time someone clicks your ad.
The share of people who click after seeing your ad or search result.
The share of visitors who complete a desired action.
Grounding an LLM's answers in retrieved documents so it responds from real, current data.
Revenue generated for every unit of currency spent on advertising.
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