Negation and unnegate rule

A negation rule blocks a search term. An unnegation rule restores one. They are configured as two-way rules because the second is what makes the first safe to run.

What it does

Four actions are available:

Action	Effect
Create Negative Exact	Block this exact query
Create Negative Phrase	Block any query containing this phrase
Remove Negative Exact	Restore an exact-negated query
Remove Negative Phrase	Restore a phrase-negated query

The change is always local

However wide the safeguard looks, the negative is created only in the ad group the rule is assigned to. A rule set to Product Group scope does not write negatives across the group.

Close variants are one decision family

The App does not score spelling variants as unrelated rows. It builds one comparison key by removing diacritics, punctuation, a trailing plural s, and the function words and, or, the, of, for, with, in, on, at, by, to and from.

Within each campaign and ad group, search terms with the same key form one close-variant family. dandelion and root tea and dandelion root tea, for example, are evaluated together.

The rule then:

1. sums performance across the entire family;
2. evaluates Criteria against that total;
3. produces at most one negative for the family; and
4. takes its text from the shortest member Amazon will accept as a keyword, alphabetically first on a tie.

Removing a negative works the same way with the negative as the unit: the rule sums every search term that negative blocks — its close-variant family for a Negative Exact, every term the phrase covers for a Negative Phrase — and removes it only when that total passes. The decision is aggregated, but Preview keeps the evidence readable by listing the individual members — the top 3 when creating a negative and up to 8 when removing one — and states how many search terms were scored together.

When creating a negative, safeguards fail closed for the whole family. If any member is whitelisted, has an order when the zero-order safeguard applies, or is already covered by a negative, the rule leaves the whole family unchanged. Negative product targets are ASINs rather than text variants and continue to evaluate one row at a time.

Triggers

A Negation rule chooses between two trigger modes:

• Standard Criteria — the default. Best for no-sale, low-sale and high-ACOS terms that a single Data Window settles.
• Performance Deterioration — for terms that previously converted and have since stopped, confirmed at both a 60-day and a 30-day checkpoint against a longer Historical Window.

The two guards available on Bidding rules, Loss Budget Guard and Momentum Guard, are not offered here. Negation has its own pair.

An unnegation rule always runs Standard Criteria. Performance Deterioration is the shape “was good, now bad”, which is the right direction for creating a negative and exactly the wrong one for removing it, so a rule set to unnegate is forced back to Standard Criteria rather than inheriting three checkpoints that would mean nothing.

Scope

Both directions offer a Search Term scope: Individual ASIN or Product Group. Individual ASIN is the default.

The setting decides how widely the safeguard looks, not which traffic the Criteria score. Criteria are always scored on the search terms’ traffic in the assigned ad group.

• Negation at ASIN scope checks the 365-day orders checkbox against every ad group advertising the product.
• Negation at group scope checks it against every ad group advertising any product in the Product Group, so an order on a sibling also protects the term.
• Unnegation has no such safeguard, so the setting does not change what it evaluates.

An unnegation decision carries the evidence it was scored on: what the blocked terms did in that ad group over the Data Window.

Why unnegation exists

A negative stops its terms from serving in that ad group, so nothing new arriving there will show that the block was wrong. Unnegation re-reads what the blocked terms did in that ad group within the Data Window, and removes a negative whose summed numbers pass its Criteria. Without it, negation only moves in one direction.

What unnegation reads

An unnegation rule judges each live Negative Exact or Negative Phrase in the ad groups it is assigned to. It sums the traffic of the search terms that negative blocks — in that ad group, over the rule’s Data Window — and removes the negative when the total passes its Criteria. Every term the negative blocked reopens together.

Because the negative has been blocking those terms there, that traffic mostly comes from before the negative was added. A negative whose terms have no traffic in the window cannot be judged and stays in place. The rule does not read how the terms perform in other ad groups or for other products in the Product Group, so a removal is not evidence that a term has sold elsewhere since the block.

Negatives set at campaign level and negative product targets are not removed by this rule.

The 365-day orders checkbox

This checkbox is enabled by default. It skips any term that produced an order within the past 365 days at the selected scope.

It accounts for seasonality. A term that sold last November but has been quiet since is different from one that has never sold, and a 90-day window cannot show that distinction. At Product Group scope, an order from any product in the group counts.

Unnegation does not use this setting. It applies only when creating negatives.

Selecting Performance Deterioration turns the checkbox off because both settings rely on converted terms. If you enable it again while the Historical Criteria requires orders or sales, the rule may have no eligible terms to act on.

Terms already covered by an existing negative are skipped, so the rule does not create duplicate negatives. An exact rule also skips terms already covered by a phrase negative.

Negative coverage uses the same close-variant key as family scoring. A differently punctuated, pluralised or function-word spelling can therefore count as the existing negative in both Negation and Unnegation.

Word limits

Amazon limits Negative Phrase to 4 words and Negative Exact to 10 words. The App stops a longer candidate before delivery and marks it permanently skipped, rather than sending and retrying an action Amazon cannot accept.

Whitelist and Blacklist switches

Whitelist protects terms from negative creation by default, including ordinary Negation, Negation word and Blacklist actions. Two switches let a Negation rule participate in that workflow:

• Ignore the Whitelist allows this rule to negate a protected term. It is off by default.
• Add to the Blacklist after apply adds the term to the ASIN’s Blacklist only after Amazon has successfully created the negative. A staged or failed proposal is not recorded there.

Considerations

• Exact and phrase are not interchangeable. A phrase negative can block queries you have never seen, including future ones. Use it when the losing pattern is the phrase itself, not one query.
• Blocking a term at ASIN scope while the group is still converting on it is a legitimate decision — but make it deliberately, not by leaving the scope on its default.
• Coverage is one-way: an exact-match rule skips a term a phrase negative already covers, but an existing Negative Exact does not cover a broader Negative Phrase or a product target.