4.1/5 on Trustpilot The free audit is yours to keep — hire me or not
FREE TOOL · NO SIGN-UP

Which keywords are your own negatives switching off?

A negative that blocks a keyword you are bidding on throws no error and spends nothing. The keyword just never serves, and it looks identical to one nobody searches for. This finds them.

THE SILENT ONE

Which of your keywords are your own negatives switching off?

A negative that blocks a keyword you are bidding on produces no error, no warning and no spend. The keyword simply never serves, and in the console it looks identical to a keyword nobody searches for. Accounts accumulate these for years.

1 · Bulk operations file — required Advertising → Bulk operations → download a Sponsored Products spreadsheet, then Save As → CSV
2 · Search term report — optional Adds the expensive finding: terms that produced orders and are now negated with nothing still targeting them

Read in your browser, never uploaded. A bulk export is the whole structure of your ad account — every campaign, bid and keyword. That is the file you should be most reluctant to send anyone, which is why this does not ask you to.

WHAT IS SWITCHED OFF

BLOCKED CONVERTERS
—
BLOCKED KEYWORDS
—
DUPLICATES
—
REDUNDANT NEGATIVES
—

Want the audit checklist?

Your number above is yours - nothing was sent anywhere. If it would help, I'll email the four reports an audit runs on and the read-only access steps, so you can see the same thing across your whole catalogue.

One email. No sequence, no newsletter, and your figures above are not stored.

Why nobody catches these

Every other account problem announces itself. Wasted spend shows up as spend. A weak listing shows up as a conversion rate. A blocked keyword shows up as nothing at all — no impressions, no clicks, no cost, no flag. The only way to find it is to compare your keywords against your negatives, and Amazon gives you no screen that does that.

They accumulate for a specific reason: negatives are added in a hurry, usually during a cleanup, and keywords are added later by somebody working from a different report. Neither person is wrong. Six months on, a phrase negative added to stop one bad search term is also suppressing three keywords somebody built an ad group around.

If the report comes back clean, that is a real result and worth knowing. The next files to run are the wasted-spend checker for terms that are serving and should not be, and the listing vs ads checker if the problem is conversion rather than targeting.

Questions people actually ask

Because a negative that blocks one of your own keywords produces no error, no warning and no spend. The keyword simply never serves. In the console it looks exactly like a keyword nobody searches for, so there is nothing to notice and nothing to investigate. Accounts accumulate these over years, and every one is a term somebody decided was worth targeting and then quietly turned off.
Because negatives only exist in the bulk file. A search-term report tells you what customers typed; it carries no entities, no match-type rows for your own negatives, and no campaign or ad-group IDs. The conflict is between two things you configured, and the bulk export is the only place both of them appear. It is a harder file to get, which is exactly why almost nobody checks this.
We do not treat it as blocking, and that is deliberate. Amazon documents negative exact and negative phrase behaviour precisely enough to reason about; negative broad is looser and not guaranteed to suppress a given keyword. Reporting it as a definite block would send you deleting a negative that was doing its job. So the tool reports only what it can stand behind, and says so on the results.
A search term that produced orders, is now negated, and has no enabled keyword anywhere still targeting it. It is proven demand that is currently switched off, which makes it the most expensive item on the list and the only one where the fix is obvious. It needs your search-term report as well as the bulk file, and it is worth the second upload.
No. Only rows whose state is enabled are considered, because a paused negative cannot block anything and a paused keyword is not trying to serve. Counting them would fill the report with conflicts that are not real, which is the fastest way to make a tool like this ignorable.
No. It is read in your browser and never sent. This matters more here than on any other tool we publish: a bulk export is the entire structure of your advertising account, every campaign, every bid, every keyword and every negative. It is the last file a seller should hand to an agency they have not hired yet, so the tool is built so you do not have to.