Do Google Ads help your organic ranking?

No. Advertising with Google has no effect on where you rank in its ordinary, unpaid results, and Google couldn't be clearer about it. Microsoft says the same of Bing. You can't buy a better position from either of them, directly or as a side effect of an ad budget. What ads can do is put you on the page for searches you don't rank for yet, and show you which of those searches deserve a page of their own.

This piece is part of our series on marketing myths, checked, which tests what small and medium businesses are told against what the people who run the systems actually publish.

How the claim usually goes

It turns up in one of three forms. Running Google Ads "sends signals" that lift your unpaid ranking. Google rewards its advertisers with better placement. Or, in reverse, stop your ads and your rankings will fall. Each gets passed on as common knowledge. We're describing the claims here, not the people who repeat them.

What Google says

On its page about whether you need an SEO, Google says: "Advertising with Google won't have any effect on your site's presence in our search results. Google never accepts money to include or rank sites in our search results, and it costs nothing to appear in our organic search results."

It says so twice more, on its page about how ads work and in its own advertising help, which makes it about as firm a statement as you'll find anywhere in Google's documentation.

The map results work the same way

Google's Business Profile help says: "There's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google." It says local results "are mainly based on relevance, distance and popularity", and that how well known a business is depends partly on "how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have". Both of those are on our local SEO checklist.

What Microsoft says

Microsoft draws the same line for Bing. Its page on how Bing delivers search results says paid advertisements "are labeled as such", and that Bing "does not allow websites to improve their organic ranking positions (the “blue links”) through payment."

Why so many people believe it

Part of the confusion is simply what you see. Ads and unpaid results sit on the same page, often for the same search, so a business that starts advertising sees itself near the top and takes that for a ranking change. It isn't one. The ad is a separate, labelled placement that disappears the moment the budget stops.

The other part is timing. A business that starts ads usually starts other work at the same time: a new site, more reviews, better pages. Any change in the unpaid results then gets credited to the ads, and neither Google nor Microsoft publishes anything that would support giving them the credit.

How ads and SEO do work together

They work together, just not through ranking.

• Ads cover the gaps. Unpaid search takes time, as anyone who has asked how long SEO takes will know. Ads can put you on the page for searches you don't rank for yet, from the day they go live.
• Ads show you which searches bring enquiries. Google's paid and organic report, which needs Search Console linked to Google Ads, puts your ads and your unpaid results side by side, to help you "understand how paid text ads and organic search results work together". Any search where your ads do well and you have no page is a page worth writing.
• Promotion helps people find you. Google's SEO starter guide lists "Advertisement, both offline and online" among the ways to promote a site, and says promotion "will lead to faster discovery by those who are interested in the same subject, and also by search engines." That's about being found, not being ranked higher.

Whether ads are worth it for you at all is a separate question. It comes down to what a customer is worth to you against what a click costs, and we show how to work that out in whether Google Ads are worth it and what they cost.

A quick check

• Nobody has told us our ads will lift our organic ranking.
• We budget for ads and SEO as separate jobs, each judged on its own results.
• Search Console is linked to Google Ads, so we can see paid and organic together.
• We know which searches our ads convert on, and whether we have a page for each.
• If we stopped our ads, we know which enquiries would stop with them.

What nobody has shown

• Indirect effects. Someone who finds you through an ad might later link to you, review you or search for your name, and Google says links and reviews bear on local ranking. Neither Google nor Microsoft says whether that chain has a measurable effect, and we found no reliable study that settles it, so we make no claim either way.
• Other engines and assistants. We checked Google and Bing, which publish clear statements. We didn't find an equivalent statement from every other search service.

So, do ads help your ranking?

False. On Google's and Microsoft's own word, paying for ads changes nothing about where you rank in the unpaid results, and Google says the same of its map results. So judge ads on what they bring in directly, and use what they tell you to decide which pages are worth writing.

If you'd like an account built around the searches that actually bring enquiries, that's what our Google Ads launch does, for a fixed £2,500 with 30 days of changes after it goes live.