My negative keywords not blocking some searches

Do negative keywords sometimes miss searches with different wording? I don't want to keep adding more and accidentally block useful traffic.

For local lead gen on Google Ads, exact match plus a tight geo radius beats broad every time. I start campaigns with 10 to 15 exact keywords max.

negative keywords can be a bit tricky because they don’t handle close variants the same way positive keywords do. i’d check the search terms report regularly and add negatives based on what’s actually spending money. keep the obvious exclusions in an account-level list and use campaign-level negatives for anything more specific.

With the advent of google ai, it's just easier to setup campaigns in the first few days using phrase correspondency, and no negative keywords at all, unless your product have some word that always attract the wrong type of clients. Because exact match doesn't work anymore (and they don't work as they supposed to work few years ago, they will still attract some other words related to that), and if you close too much on the campaign, google ads just don't deliver nothing at all.

If you have a good lp and works that works well with the lp, the entire google ai will handle things better than trying to use negative keywords

Definitely, it depends on the match type. Just start with clear irrelevant terms and monitor the search terms report before expanding your list.

Yes, negative keywords can miss close variations depending on the match type, I would recommend you to check the search terms report regularly before adding more negatives.