Google is making some changes to its match types again, this time phrase match will expand to cover additional broad match modifier traffic. However, Google said this will continue “to respect word order when it’s important to the meaning.” This change will start rolling out over the next two weeks.

Google explained “With these improvements, you can reach the searches you want just by using phrase match—without worrying about the searches you don’t want. Let’s say you’re a moving company that wants to reach people interested in moving out of New York City. With the updated phrase match, you can reach people looking to move from NYC to Boston, for example, without showing up for people looking to move from Boston to NYC.”

Here is how it visually looks (click to enlarge):

Here are some examples Google provided:

I asked the PPC community about their early reactions to this and it is somewhat mixed but still an overall negative to having less control. Google has historically made changes to match types where they would expand the keyword set above and beyond what advertisers wanted. Here is some history on that:

2019 : Google Ads Expands Broad & Phrase Match To Include Keyword Close Variants
2018 : Google Ads Expands Exact Match To Include Same Meaning Of Words
2017 : Google AdWords Upsets Advertisers By Expanding Meaning Of Close Variants
2014 : Google AdWords Exact Match Now Matches On All Plurals, Misspellings, Etc.

Here is some of the reaction from the industry:

I also recommend you read the responses to Google posting about this on Twitter – click over and read the responses.

A WebmasterWorld thread is not too optimistic about these changes, here are some quotes:

Google added a lot more detail on what is changing in this help document, so it is a must read for anyone using Google Ads.

Forum discussion at Twitter & WebmasterWorld.