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You’re not imagining it. Match types have been getting looser for years, and Google keeps leaning harder into “intent” interpretation rather than literal keyword matching.
The practical result is exactly what you’re seeing. Exact and phrase start behaving closer to broad with guardrails, so the search term report becomes a constant cleanup exercise.
At this point negative keyword maintenance is basically part of the campaign routine. Curious if others are seeing the same drift in higher spend accounts.
