Glossary
What is exact match in Google Ads?
Melvin Salas1 min readVerified 16 October 2026
Short answer
Exact match is the narrowest of Google's three keyword matching options. Google says ads may show on searches that have the same meaning or same intent as the keyword, and that of the three, exact match gives you the most steering over who views your ad, but reaches fewer searches than both phrase and broad match.
The syntax is square brackets, such as [red shoe]. Same meaning is wider than same words: Google says all keyword match types are eligible to match to close variants and there's no way to opt out. For exact match keywords those may include misspellings and singular or plural forms in all languages and, in a listed set of languages, reordered words with the same meaning, implied words, synonyms and paraphrases, and searches with the same search intent.
Google also says broader match types capture all the queries of narrower match types, plus more, so a phrase match keyword will match all the searches as the same keyword in an exact match.
That is why the search terms report can show a search as Exact match when a broader keyword triggered it. Google's example is the broad match keyword purple flowers matching the search purple flowers: the search term match type is exact match, even though the keyword is broad match.
Our reading: exact match is the most control Google sells, not total control. Before we treat an exact keyword's numbers as the numbers for its literal words, we read the rows marked close variant in the search terms report.
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