If you log into a Google Ads account, one of the first things you see is a tab called Recommendations, and a big number next to it called your optimisation score. Google is fairly insistent that you get that score up towards 100%. You will get emails about it. If your spend is high enough, you will get a phone call from a Google rep about it too.
The pitch is simple: apply these suggestions and your ads will perform better. And some of them genuinely will help. But that score is not a report card on how well your account is doing. It is a measure of how closely you are following Google's advice, and Google's advice is not always in your interest. It is worth understanding the difference before you start clicking "apply", because I have seen accounts where following every recommendation quietly doubled the budget without adding a single extra enquiry.
What the optimisation score actually measures
Here is the bit that trips people up. A high optimisation score does not mean your account is profitable. It does not know whether you are getting enquiries or wasting money. It only knows whether you have accepted the changes Google has put in front of you.
You can have a beautifully run account making a healthy return and sitting at 78%, and a badly run one at 100% because it said yes to everything. The score and the results are two different things. So the first thing I would do is stop treating that number as a target. It is a prompt to review some suggestions, nothing more.
The reason this matters is that Google makes its money when you spend more. That does not make every recommendation a trick, most are perfectly reasonable, but it does mean you should read each one asking a simple question: is this good for me, or good for Google, or both? Plenty are both. A few are firmly the middle option.
The recommendations usually worth applying
Some suggestions are just good housekeeping, and I will often apply these without much hesitation.
If Google flags that your conversion tracking is broken or missing, fix it straight away. Without proper tracking you are flying blind, and everything else you do is guesswork. If it points out disapproved ads or a policy problem, sort that too, an ad that is switched off is earning you nothing.
Adding sitelinks, callouts and other ad assets is usually worthwhile as well. These are the extra links and lines that sit under your ad, and they give people more reasons to click and more ways in. They are free to add and they make your ad take up more space, which pushes competitors further down the page.
Fixing genuinely broken keywords or a thin ad group can help too, as long as the change matches how your customers actually search. The test is always the same: does this reflect real buying intent, or is it just widening the net?
The ones to slow down on
This is where the free audits I run tend to find the damage. A handful of recommendations turn up again and again, and they are the ones I would never apply on autopilot.
Raising your budget. Google will regularly suggest you spend more to "capture missed impressions". Sometimes there is real demand you are leaving on the table. Often you are being nudged to bid on looser, lower-quality searches. Only lift a budget when the numbers already show you are profitable at your current spend and genuinely turning away good enquiries.
Switching keywords to broad match. Broad match lets Google show your ad for searches that are loosely related to your keywords, and it is one of the fastest ways to burn money if your account is not watertight. A plumber on broad match can end up paying for clicks on "how to fix a dripping tap" from people who have no intention of hiring anyone. I have written before about why your Google Ads get clicks but no enquiries, and loose match types are near the top of that list.
"Optimised targeting" and audience expansion. These quietly widen who sees your ads beyond the people you chose. On a tight local budget, wider is rarely better.
Bidding strategy changes. Switching to Maximise Conversions or a new target cost-per-action can help, but it can also hand more control to the algorithm at the wrong moment. If your tracking is shaky or you have thin data, an automated strategy just chases bad signals faster.
Upgrading a campaign to Performance Max. This comes up a lot, and it is a genuinely big change, not a tweak. Whether it suits you depends entirely on your situation, which is why I wrote a whole piece on whether small businesses should run Performance Max rather than treat it as a one-click yes.
Turn off auto-apply
This is the single most important setting in this whole conversation, and a lot of business owners do not know it exists.
Google can apply recommendations for you, automatically, without asking. In some accounts auto-apply is switched on by default, quietly making changes to your budgets, keywords and bidding while you get on with running your business. I have opened accounts where the budget had crept up month after month, and the owner had no idea why, because the changes were being applied for them and buried in a history log they never looked at.
Go into the Recommendations tab, find the auto-apply settings, and switch off anything you have not deliberately chosen. You want to be the one deciding what changes and when. It takes two minutes and it is the closest thing to a free win in this article.
A sensible way to handle the tab
You do not need to check recommendations daily, and you certainly should not chase the score. Once a month is plenty for most small accounts.
When you do look, go through them one at a time. Apply the housekeeping ones, the tracking fixes, the disapprovals, the useful assets. Read the growth ones, the budget lifts, the match type changes, the targeting expansions, with a bit of suspicion, and dismiss the ones that do not fit. Dismissing a recommendation is completely fine, and no, it does not get you in trouble with Google. Your score will drop a little, and it genuinely does not matter.
If a Google rep rings you pushing a budget increase or a shift to broad match, there is no harm in listening, but treat it as a sales call, because that is what it is. Nobody on that call is measuring their success by your return on ad spend. If you are unsure what a good return even looks like, what counts as a good ROAS is a better yardstick than any optimisation score.
The short version
The Recommendations tab is a mix of sound advice and gentle upselling, and the skill is telling them apart. Fix what is broken, add what is free, and be wary of anything that widens your reach or lifts your spend. Above all, turn off auto-apply so nothing changes without your say-so. A well-run account at 80% will beat a hands-off one at 100% every time.
If you would rather not second-guess every prompt Google puts in front of you, that is a fair bit of what we do. Our Google Ads management is about spending your budget where it actually brings in work, and if you just want a second opinion on your current account, the free Google Ads audit will tell you honestly where your money is going, no account access and no obligation. It pairs well with the other side of the coin, how to stop wasting money on Google Ads.