No. Quality Score, and the ad relevance rating inside it, only exists for Search campaigns. Google's own help article on the subject is titled "About Quality Score for Search campaigns", and it describes ad relevance as how closely an ad matches the intent behind a user's search.
Display, Performance Max, YouTube and Demand Gen campaigns have no Quality Score column, no ad relevance status, and no equivalent rating of any kind. Nothing in the interface tells you when relevance is failing on those campaigns.
That matters more than it sounds, because relevance still decides whether Display money works. It is simply decided by different things, and you have to measure it yourself.
Why Display has no Quality Score
Quality Score grades the match between three things: the keyword someone searched, the ad you showed them, and the page they landed on. Every part of that depends on a search query existing.
On Display there is no query. Google matches your ad to a person (through audience signals) and to a page (through placements, topics and content). The person did not ask for anything. So there is nothing for an ad relevance score to compare your ad against.
Performance Max makes this murkier, because it runs across Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail and Discover from one campaign. Its Search inventory is influenced by relevance in the usual way, but you cannot see a Quality Score for it, and the Display and video share of the campaign has none at all.
What decides relevance on Display instead
If you run both Search and Display, it helps to translate the Search concepts across.
| On Search | On Display and PMAX |
|---|---|
| The search query | The page the ad appears on |
| Keyword-to-ad match | Placement and context fit |
| Ad relevance rating | No rating. You infer it from performance by placement |
| Landing page experience | Unchanged, still matters |
In practice, four things decide whether a Display impression is relevant.
The placement. The page your ad appears on is the closest thing Display has to a search query. A running shoe ad on a marathon training article is relevant. The same ad on a ringtone download page is not, even if the person seeing it matches your audience exactly.
The audience signal. Audience targeting decides who sees the ad. It cannot tell you whether that person was paying attention, on a page worth being on, or clicking by accident.
The creative in its environment. An ad that works on a news site can look out of place, or worse, on a page full of other ads competing for the same attention.
Content and topic settings. Content exclusions and topic targeting shape which pages are eligible at all. They are blunt, but they are the Display equivalent of negative keywords.
Of these, placement is the one most advertisers never look at, and it is where most of the waste sits.
How to tell when Display relevance is failing
Without a score, you have to read it from your own numbers. These are the signals worth checking in your placement report.
Conversion rate by placement. The most direct proxy. Placements that take spend and never convert are the Display equivalent of a Below average keyword.
Click-through rate that is too high. Display CTR normally sits well under 1%. A placement several times your account average usually means accidental or automated clicks, not interest. In one account we analyzed, a single placement had an 84% click-through rate and converted nothing.
Impressions with no clicks at all. Thousands of impressions and zero clicks often means the ad was never really visible.
Spend concentrated in unfamiliar domains. If you cannot recognize most of the sites your budget reached, that is the finding.
To pull the report, go to Reports → Predefined reports → Other → Campaign URL performance in Google Ads and set the range to at least 90 days.
What to do about it
- Audit your placements. Sort by cost, then check the long tail. Most of the problem hides in small rows.
- Build an exclusion list from what you find, and apply it at the account level so it covers every Display and PMAX campaign automatically. The complete guide to account-level exclusions walks through it.
- Add content exclusions for the categories that never fit your brand.
- Re-check quarterly. New low-quality sites appear constantly.
You can run the first pass yourself with the free placement report tool. It reads your report in the browser, uploads nothing, flags suspicious placements and builds an exclusion list. If you would rather have every site actually visited and scored, we will audit your top placements for free.
If you also run Search
Your Search campaigns do have an ad relevance rating, and the most common reason for a Below average status is an ad group that mixes several intents. Our free ad relevance checker shows which keywords are not reflected in your ads and whether an ad group should be split. For the Search side of the topic in more depth, see what ad relevance is and how to improve it.