Why Is Your Quality Score Low, and Does It Still Matter in 2026?

Few numbers in Google Ads cause as much hand-wringing as Quality Score. You open your account, see a string of 4s and 5s where you hoped for 8s and 9s, and assume your campaigns are doomed to overpay. Then someone tells you Quality Score barely matters anymore in an age of automation, and you are left unsure whether to obsess over it or ignore it entirely.

The truth sits in between, and it has shifted in an important way. Here is what is actually dragging your score down, and whether the number deserves your attention in 2026.

A quick reminder of what Quality Score is

Quality Score is Google’s rating, on a scale of one to ten, of how relevant and useful your keywords, ads and landing pages are to the people searching. It is built from three components: your expected click-through rate, your ad relevance, and your landing page experience. Score well across all three, and Google rewards you with better ad positions at a lower cost per click. Score poorly, and you pay more to appear in worse spots or struggle to appear at all.

That cost relationship is why it has always mattered. Two advertisers can bid the same amount and end up paying very different prices, simply because one has earned Google’s trust that their ad is worth showing.

Why your Quality Score might be low

If your scores are disappointing, the cause almost always traces back to one of the three components.

Weak ad relevance. This is the most common offender. If your ad copy does not closely match the keywords in the ad group, Google sees a mismatch. Cramming dozens of loosely related keywords into one ad group makes it impossible for a single ad to feel relevant to all of them. Tightly themed ad groups, where the keywords and the ad speak the same language, fix this fast.

Low expected click-through rate. If Google predicts that few people will click your ad, your score suffers. This usually points to unconvincing copy, a weak or missing offer, or ads that fail to stand out against competitors. It can also stem from poor match type choices that put your ad in front of the wrong searches.

Poor landing page experience. Even a perfect ad will be marked down if it sends people to a slow, confusing or irrelevant page. Google assesses whether the page loads quickly, works on mobile, and genuinely delivers what the ad promised. A great ad pointing at a weak page is one of the most common and most fixable causes of a low score. This is where dedicated landing page design earns its keep, alongside broader conversion rate optimisation work that makes those pages convert once people arrive.

Not enough data. New keywords and new accounts often start with a middling score simply because Google has not gathered enough information yet. Sometimes the fix is patience and volume rather than a frantic rebuild.

So does Quality Score still matter in 2026?

Here is the nuance that trips people up. The visible one-to-ten number you see in your account matters less than it used to. The principles behind it matter more than ever.

Google’s auction has become far more automated. With Smart Bidding, Performance Max and AI-driven broad match doing the heavy lifting, the system increasingly relies on real-time, auction-time signals rather than the static Quality Score figure displayed in your dashboard. We have written about how this automated approach plays out in practice in driving results with Performance Max. In that world, staring at the displayed number and trying to nudge it up by a point is largely a waste of energy.

But, and this is the crucial part, the things Quality Score measures are exactly what the automated systems reward. Relevance, compelling ads and strong landing pages are the raw material the algorithm uses to decide who wins the auction and at what price. The number has become a diagnostic readout rather than a lever you pull directly. A low score is still a genuine warning sign. It is telling you that one of the fundamentals is weak, and that weakness will cost you whether or not you are watching the figure itself.

So the modern answer is this. Stop treating Quality Score as a target to game. Start treating it as a health check that points you towards the relevance and experience problems the algorithm cares about.

Feed the machine good data

There is one more factor that has grown in importance. Automated bidding is only as good as the conversion data you feed it. If your tracking is incomplete or broken, the system optimises towards the wrong things, and no amount of Quality Score tinkering will save you.

Getting your measurement right is now foundational, which is why we put so much weight on proper tracking setup, as we explained in “Why Google Tag Manager is a game changer for tracking your campaigns” and in “Recovering lost conversions with server-side tracking”. Clean, complete conversion data does more for your results in 2026 than chasing a higher Quality Score ever will.

A quick word on brand terms

One reliable place to see strong Quality Scores is your own brand searches, where relevance is naturally high, and clicks are cheap. That is one of several reasons brand bidding remains worthwhile, which we made the case for in the benefits of own-brand bidding. If even your brand terms are scoring poorly, that is a strong signal that something more fundamental is wrong.

The takeaway

Quality Score is not dead, but the way you should think about it has changed. The number on your screen is a symptom, not the disease. Fix the things it measures, namely tightly themed ad groups, genuinely relevant ads, and fast, on-message landing pages, and feed the algorithm clean conversion data, and both your costs and your results will improve regardless of what the figure says.

If your Google Ads costs feel higher than they should be and you suspect quality is the reason, a proper Google Ads account audit will pinpoint exactly where the relevance is breaking down. As a leading PPC Agency, we can help you turn those findings into lower costs and better performance.