Forums › Forums › PPC › Google Ads phrase match close variants spiraling out of control – anyone else seeing this? › Reply To: Google Ads phrase match close variants spiraling out of control – anyone else seeing this?
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TTFV
GuestNovember 11, 2025 at 7:58 pmYou should focus on revising your keyword strategy into exact and broad match options. Exact match will, obviously, continue to give you fairly close matching queries for greater control.
These days broad and phrase can serve for almost the same range of queries. Yes, the matching rules for phrase are tighter, but that’s not the whole story.
Broad match will use a variety of additional signals including other keywords in the ad group, landing page information, and some user characteristics to bid more efficiently and for more relevant queries. This often more the compensates for matching rules.
Plus, only broad match (or keywordless) qualifies for placement inside of AI overview and AI mode results. So it’ll be important to have a solution in place to address this as adoption continues to grow.