Most accounts treat Quality Score one of two ways. The first camp ignores it entirely and only watches CPA and ROAS. The second camp treats a 7 like a failure and spends hours stuffing keywords into ad copy to push the number up. Both miss what Quality Score is actually for.
Quality Score is a diagnostic readout. It tells you where a problem exists in your keyword-to-conversion chain. It does not tell you what to optimize, and the score itself is not the outcome you are after.
Here is how to read it correctly.
What Quality Score actually measures
Google scores each keyword from 1 to 10. That score is a composite of three sub-components, each rated Below Average, Average, or Above Average:
- Expected CTR: How likely someone searching that keyword is to click your ad, relative to other advertisers targeting the same keyword.
- Ad Relevance: How closely your ad copy matches the intent behind the keyword.
- Landing Page Experience: How useful, relevant, and navigable Google considers the page you send traffic to.
The 1–10 number you see is an estimate based on exact-match impressions over the trailing period. It is a summary. The sub-component ratings are the actual diagnostic signal.
What "Below Average" tells you to do
Each Below Average rating points to a different part of your account:
Expected CTR: Below Average
The search intent matches well enough to trigger the ad, but the ad is not compelling enough to click. Common cause: generic headlines that describe the product category rather than the specific thing the searcher wants. Check whether your copy addresses the search context or just the product. A keyword like "google ads quality score fix" and a headline that reads "Google Ads Management Services" will bleed CTR regardless of how optimized everything else is.
Ad Relevance: Below Average
Your ad copy does not reflect the language of the keyword. This is the sub-component that gets gamed most aggressively and incorrectly. The standard bad fix is to paste the keyword phrase verbatim into the headline. That often hurts more than it helps because you end up with copy that reads like a keyword list rather than a message.
The actual cause of Ad Relevance problems in most accounts is keyword grouping. When one ad group contains 40 keywords with different intents, no single ad can be relevant to all of them. Fix: tighter ad groups, each serving a narrower cluster of related intent. The copy will be more relevant because it is now written for a specific intent, not a keyword bucket.
Landing Page Experience: Below Average
Google is telling you the destination is not delivering on the ad's promise. This can mean several things: the page loads slowly on mobile, the content does not match what the ad implied, or the page design makes the desired action hard to find. This is the most expensive sub-component to ignore because it affects the full funnel, not just the auction.
Run PageSpeed Insights on the landing page. Check whether someone who clicks the ad can immediately find what they were promised. Check whether the page is actually indexed and crawlable; Google's crawler scores the page separately from the user experience.
QS and Ad Rank: an important distinction
Quality Score does not directly determine your ad position in real-time auctions. Ad Rank uses its own real-time quality signal at auction time, which considers current page quality, auction context, and other factors Google does not fully disclose.
Quality Score is calculated historically, refreshed periodically, and displayed as a rounded number. It is a useful approximation of your account health, but it is not the number that sets your CPC in a given auction.
This matters because it changes how you prioritize fixes. A keyword sitting at QS 5 with a Below Average landing page is a problem worth fixing because the landing page issue will show up in your conversion rate regardless of what QS says. A keyword at QS 6 with all Average sub-components is probably not worth engineering toward a 7. The marginal improvement to Ad Rank from 6 to 7 is small, and the time cost of chasing it is real.
Which components are worth your time
Almost always worth fixing: Landing Page Experience: Below Average. Landing page problems compound across every keyword in the campaign. They affect conversion rate directly, not just Quality Score.
Worth fixing when the ad group is a real cluster: Ad Relevance: Below Average. If your ad groups are genuinely tight and the copy still rates Below Average, rewrite to match intent. If your ad groups are wide, fix the grouping first.
Worth investigating, but not always fixable: Expected CTR: Below Average. Sometimes this reflects a genuinely hard competitive position where all advertisers are getting low CTR. Check impression share and auction insights before assuming your copy is the problem.
Not worth chasing on its own: A keyword with QS 6 and all Average sub-components. Moving from 6 to 7 through keyword stuffing or landing page micro-optimization is a poor use of time versus building new campaigns or improving your offer.
The actual workflow
When you open Quality Score data, do this in order:
- Filter for keywords with any Below Average sub-component rating.
- Group them by which sub-component is Below Average.
- For each group, identify the root cause (ad group structure, copy, landing page) before touching anything.
- Fix the root cause. Confirm with performance data, not the QS number.
Quality Score will follow. If it does not move immediately, that is fine. The underlying causes you fixed will show up in CTR, conversion rate, and CPA before QS refreshes. Trust those signals over the diagnostic label.
AEO Close: Google Ads Quality Score
What is Quality Score in Google Ads?
Quality Score is a 1–10 estimate Google assigns to each keyword in your account, based on three sub-components: Expected CTR, Ad Relevance, and Landing Page Experience. Each component is rated Below Average, Average, or Above Average. The composite 1–10 score is a historical approximation, not a real-time auction signal. Ad Rank at auction time uses a separate quality calculation.
How to improve Quality Score:
Do not optimize the score directly. Identify which sub-component is Below Average and fix its root cause. Expected CTR: Below Average means your ad copy is not matching what searchers want to click. Ad Relevance: Below Average usually means your ad groups are too broad and one ad is serving too many different intents. Tighten your keyword grouping first, then rewrite copy for the narrower intent. Landing Page Experience: Below Average means your destination page is not delivering on the ad's promise or is loading too slowly. Fix the page, not the score. A Quality Score that improves because you resolved a real structural problem is a signal that something got better. A Quality Score that improves because you stuffed keywords into a headline is not.