I Dismissed 1,476 of Google's Ad Recommendations Last Week

Last week I dismissed 1,476 of Google’s ad recommendations across twenty accounts. Every account’s Optimization Score went up.

Optimization Score rises whether you apply a recommendation or dismiss it. It measures whether you have cleared Google’s to-do list, not whether the account makes money. I cleared the list on those twenty accounts by adding 97 keywords by hand and dismissing the other 1,476. The scores climbed toward 100, and nothing about the accounts had changed.

What the score counts

Optimization Score looks like a health grade. It’s a percentage, it sits at the top of the account, and a Google rep or an agency will tell you to push it to 100%. It isn’t a health grade. It’s the share of Google’s open recommendations you have addressed, and you address one in two ways: apply it, or dismiss it.

Ignore a recommendation and it drags your score down. Dismiss that same recommendation and your score goes up. Nothing about the account changed. No performance moved. You cleared the item. So a 100% Optimization Score tells you one thing for certain: someone went through the recommendations tab. It doesn’t tell you the account makes money.

Most of the recommendations point one way

Read what Google generates and the pattern shows up fast. Broaden your match types. Turn on search partners. Add display expansion. Raise your budget. Switch to a broader bid strategy. Add these eighty keywords. Almost all of them widen the net toward more of Google’s inventory and more of your spend. A few are useful, like a specific budget note or a weak responsive ad flagged for a rewrite. Most are the house suggesting you bet more.

That isn’t a conspiracy. Google’s recommendations optimize for Google’s outcome, which is spend across more surfaces. Sometimes that lines up with yours. Often it does not. Optimization Score is the scoreboard for a game the house designed, and it’s one move in a wider pattern I keep mapped in the wasted-ad-spend library: the platform’s own advice almost always points toward spending more.

What I did on the twenty accounts

The flag was real. A thin ad group gets starved, so “not enough relevant keywords” is worth clearing. But the fix Google wanted was a bulk-accept of its keyword list, which on these accounts meant broad, out-of-area, and off-service terms that would spend before they converted.

So I cleared it the other way. On each account I added only the keywords that were locally viable and on-service, the ones a real customer in that market types. That came to 97 across the twenty. Then I dismissed the remaining 1,476, because a dismissed recommendation is a reviewed recommendation, and reviewing them is the real work. The warning cleared on all twenty, zero recommendations left open, and scores that had been sitting anywhere from the low seventies to the high nineties walked toward 100. Not because I improved anything that hour. Because I emptied the list.

The rule I run now

Treat the recommendations tab as a to-do list to review, not a score to chase.

1. Apply the few that fit your strategy. Budget notes and ad-strength fixes usually earn it.
2. Dismiss the rest deliberately. Broad match, search partners, display expansion, and “switch to a broader bid strategy” get dismissed on sight on a lead-gen account.
3. Turn off auto-apply. Leave it on and Google applies its own recommendations to your account overnight, bid-strategy changes included, with no human in the loop. I’ve opened accounts that quietly rebid themselves this way.

Google regenerates these recommendations constantly, so the list refills within weeks and the score slips again. Clearing it is a monthly pass, not a one-time fix.

Do that and your Optimization Score reads high, which is fine. Know it reads high because the list is empty, not because the account is winning. The number that says the account is winning is cost per booked sale, and it doesn’t live in the recommendations tab.

What I did not claim

Not that every recommendation is wrong. Some are worth applying, and a thin ad group is a real problem. The point is narrower. Optimization Score measures whether you cleared the list, not whether the account performs, so it isn’t a number to manage by, and it isn’t a number to let auto-apply chase with your budget.

Keep going

• AI Max and your search terms. The same automation over-reach, this time in how Google decides what your keywords match.
• Why conversions win over clicks. The number to manage the account by instead of the score.

Free PDF: The Google Ads Setup Audit. The checkpoint-by-checkpoint version of what I verify before I trust an account. No email gate.

What’s next

If your agency or your Google rep keeps pointing at your Optimization Score, ask them what it would be if you dismissed every open recommendation. Then ask what your cost per booked sale did last quarter. If you want someone to go through the account and tell you which recommendations are worth applying and which are the house betting your money, that is what an audit is for.