What is Quality Score?
Quality Score is Google's 1–10 rating of how relevant your keyword, ad and landing page are — and it directly changes what you pay.
It's built from three inputs: expected click-through rate, ad relevance to the keyword, and landing page experience. A higher score means you win the same ad position for less money than a competitor with a worse one.
This is why structure matters more than bidding on Google. Tight ad groups where a handful of closely-related keywords share one genuinely specific ad will outscore a single group covering everything, and the discount is real money rather than a vanity metric.
The most common cause of a low score is a mismatch somewhere in that chain — an ad that doesn't echo the keyword, or a landing page that doesn't deliver what the ad promised.