Ads Lighthouse vs Free Google Ads Negative Keywords Generator in 2026: external evidence vs Search hygiene

Ads Lighthouse monitors paid results on searches a team configures rather than trying to optimise the team’s own account. A project holds a brand, its domains, keywords, locations, devices, and schedule. Each check records the search term, engine, location, device, time, advertiser domain, copy, and destination for an observed paid ad. Every plan covers Google and Bing search ads; Growth and above add Google Shopping product listings with product, merchant, price, destination, and position.

The evidence workflow goes beyond a loose competitor feed. A team can filter advertiser and keyword history, identify brand mentions and affiliate markers, match declared affiliate parameters or IDs, trace eligible destinations, and organise findings in policy cases. Email, Slack, and webhook alerts help route a new advertiser or return appearance into a repeatable process. The boundary matters: observed visibility is the share of saved monitored searches where a domain appeared. It is not Google impression share, actual spend, proof of a purchased keyword, or a legal conclusion.

Starter costs $49 per month for one project, 20 keywords, two locations per project, daily checks, 7,500 scheduled checks, and 100 on-demand checks. Growth at $99 adds Shopping, while Scale at $299 adds REST API keys and client-branded reports. All plans include CSV and Excel exports, team roles, alerts, PDF reports, and the hosted MCP server. It is the right purchase for an external brand-search question, not for generating exclusions from a campaign’s own query data.

Free Google Ads Negative Keywords Generator has a deliberately narrow job: create a first pass of possible exclusions before irrelevant Google Search intent wastes budget. The user enters a main keyword, product, or service, selects an industry, chooses Global or India, and generates suggestions that can be formatted as broad, phrase, or exact negative keywords. Results can be copied or downloaded, but the published workflow does not connect to a Google Ads account or upload the list automatically.

Its most useful guardrail is the split between Recommended Negative Keywords and Review Before Adding. Employment and research-oriented terms such as jobs, careers, vacancies, internships, salaries, assignments, definitions, and meanings can be sensible exclusions for many commercial campaigns. Free, cheap, course, training, guide, PDF, and download remain ambiguous. A training provider could lose qualified traffic by excluding course, while a local service business may reasonably block a tutorial query. The tool asks the marketer to make that offer-specific judgment instead of treating a generic list as safe to upload.

The product is free and the page does not publish paid tiers, support commitments, account connections, API access, imports, sync, or ongoing monitoring. It cannot show a Search Terms Report, detect another advertiser, watch a brand term, or prove why performance changed. Use it as a lightweight pre-launch or hygiene checklist, then validate every candidate against the actual offer, campaign structure, and first-party search-query data. That manual boundary is why it complements, rather than competes with, Ads Lighthouse.