I never trusted the recommendations tab in Google Ads. Not once, not for a single client, not going back to when it was just a handful of keyword suggestions instead of the wall-to-wall nudge farm it is today. Most people treat it differently. Most people see "optimization score" and a percentage climbing toward 100 and think it's a to-do list from someone smarter than them, someone who can see things they can't. I get why. It's built to feel that way. I just never bought it, and after years of pulling account data before and after these "recommendations," I have the receipts to explain why.
Let's start with what the optimization score actually measures, because it's not what the name implies.
The score isn't measuring your performance. It's measuring your compliance.
Google frames it as an estimate of your account's potential. The first item to notice in the recommendations tab is "Your optimization score." It's Google's estimate of the account's potential. The higher the score, the better. Sounds reasonable. Here's the part that isn't in the marketing copy: the optimization score is not a measure of how well your account is performing; it is a measure of whether you are reviewing your recommendations.
You can test this yourself in about ninety seconds. You do not have to accept a recommendation to increase your score. Dismissing a recommendation gives you the exact same score uplift as applying it. You can literally dismiss every single recommendation in the list and, like magic, you'll have a 100% optimization score. Read that again. A score built entirely around "acting on suggestions" gives identical credit for saying no as it does for saying yes. If the goal were genuinely your performance, rejecting a bad idea and accepting a good one wouldn't score the same. They score the same because the point was never your performance. The point was getting you to open the tab and engage with it regularly.
The pattern in which recommendations actually move the score
Once you start tracking which suggestions carry the biggest score uplift, a pattern shows up fast, and it isn't subtle. The recommendations that raise the score the most are almost always the spend-driving ones. Broad match, budget jumps, automated bidding, audience expansion. Not bug fixes. Not conversion tracking errors. Not the boring, unglamorous account hygiene that actually protects margin. The stuff that moves the needle hardest on that big blue number is, overwhelmingly, the stuff that increases how much you spend with Google.
That's not a conspiracy theory, it's just how the scoring is built. In practice, you only reach a score of 100% if you accept exactly these expensive recommendations. An account sitting in the high 80s is often that of an experienced advertiser who deliberately accepts the efficient recommendations and rejects the expensive ones. Let that sit for a second. Inside Google's own system, a lower score can be the signature of someone managing the account well. A "perfect" score can be the signature of someone who said yes to everything, including the parts that were never going to help them.
What I actually see when I pull the data
On accounts I've managed — I won't name them, but picture a mid-size B2B SaaS account and a DTC brand running fairly typical monthly spend — the "increase budget for better performance" prompt shows up constantly, almost regardless of whether the campaign has room to scale efficiently. The prompt doesn't ask whether your cost per acquisition is trending in the right direction. It doesn't ask whether the incremental spend is going to hit diminishing returns. It looks at whether a campaign is capped and suggests removing the cap.
This isn't just my read of it. Independent tools built specifically to sanity-check these recommendations flag the same thing: a well-designed system should check saturation before suggesting more money, and often the built-in one doesn't bother. You see current spend, projected spend, daily budget needs, and potential daily spend side by side. If a campaign can't absorb more money because it's already at saturation, the tool won't suggest increases. That's presented as a selling point for a third-party layer on top of Google Ads — which tells you something on its own about what's missing from the native recommendation.
And Google has recently made the pressure toward higher spend more mechanical, not less. As of this year, budget pacing changed so that Google now paces campaigns toward the full monthly limit of 30.4 times the daily budget regardless of how many days the campaign is scheduled to run, which can increase spend pressure on campaigns with ad schedules that exclude certain days or hours, and may trigger more aggressive budget increase recommendations as a result. If your campaign only runs weekdays, or excludes certain hours because that's when your close rate actually holds up, the system now pushes harder to spend as if it ran every hour of every day. That's not an optimization for your business. That's an optimization for Google's monthly total.
Why "most people" fall for it anyway
I understand the instinct to trust it. The interface is confident. It shows a percentage. Percentages feel objective, like a credit score or a grade. And there's real social pressure layered on top — most people don't realize this: dismissing a recommendation gives you the exact same score boost as applying it, and Google doesn't penalize you for saying no. Most advertisers never learn that, so they keep clicking "apply" because the alternative feels like leaving points on the table.
Some agencies make it worse by treating the score itself as a client-facing metric, which flips the incentive completely backwards. Treating Optimisation Score as a KPI is a mistake — the score measures recommendation coverage, not business results, and including it as a primary success metric in reporting creates perverse incentives to accept recommendations that harm performance. If you're reporting "we raised your optimization score 12 points" to a client as evidence of good work, you've made the same mistake the tool is designed to bait you into.
What I actually do instead
- I open the recommendations tab, but I read it like a vendor's pitch deck, not a report card. Vendors have an interest. So does this tab.
- Any budget increase suggestion gets checked against actual saturation data first — impression share lost to budget, CPA trend over the last real stretch of time, not the last 48 hours. If a campaign isn't losing meaningful impression share to budget caps, there's no case for raising the cap just because a card in the UI told me to.
- I dismiss the ones that don't apply, deliberately, because dismissing costs nothing and I'd rather have an accurate record of what I rejected than a spotless score that means nothing.
- I never let the optimization score enter a client report as if it were a performance metric. It isn't one, and presenting it as one borrows credibility it hasn't earned.
None of this means every recommendation is bad. Genuine account errors, conflicting settings, broken conversion tracking — recommendations such as errors or conflicts in your account, you should always follow these. That category is worth your time every single week. The category worth your skepticism is the one dressed up in the same UI, wearing the same blue "apply" button, that just happens to always point toward spending more.
Google isn't lying when it calls these "recommendations." It's just never claimed, anywhere in the fine print, that the recommendation is optimized for your margin. That part, we assumed on our own. I stopped assuming it a long time ago, and every account I've audited since has only confirmed I was right not to.