Your lists
Broad
Phrase
Exact
Negatives
What each match type actually does now
Exact match, written in square brackets, no longer means the exact words. It matches the same meaning, so a search for a close variant or a reordering can trigger it. Phrase match, in quotation marks, covers searches that include your meaning with words either side. Broad match, written plain, uses the whole account as context: your landing pages, your other keywords and past performance all influence what it matches.
The practical difference is control against reach. Exact gives you the tightest control and the smallest volume; broad gives the widest reach and the least predictability. The mistake is not choosing one, it is running broad without the negative list and the search terms review that make it survivable.
Negatives are what make broad match safe
Every broad or phrase keyword needs a negative list underneath it, and the list is built from what actually happened rather than from what you imagined. Read the search terms report weekly for the first month, then monthly, and add anything irrelevant as you find it. Words like free, jobs, salary, course and diy are the usual first entries for a service business.
Watch the overlap in both directions. A negative that matches a keyword you are bidding on blocks it entirely, which this tool flags, and a negative phrase can quietly suppress far more than intended because it matches anything containing those words in order.
Keyword limits and the duplicates you cannot see
Google rejects any keyword longer than 80 characters or 10 words, and strips characters such as exclamation marks, commas, at signs and percent signs. Those rejections happen at upload and are easy to miss in a bulk import, so they are checked here before you paste the list anywhere.
Duplicates within a list are removed automatically. Duplicates across ad groups are a harder problem: the same keyword in two ad groups does not compete on price, but it does split its own data and make both ad groups slower to learn. Keeping that structure clean over time is a large part of ongoing Google Ads management, and a first pass on it is what a Google Ads audit covers.