What are related search terms and forced keywords?
Related search terms are the suggested searches shown on an arbitrage landing page. Some are chosen by the search engine from the page content. Others are proposed by the publisher, a practice often called forcing keywords. Google accepts publisher-supplied terms only when they are relevant to the page and perform well for users, and it filters the rest.
Publishers pass suggestions to Google through the terms parameter. Google's documentation says submissions are filtered on relevance, engagement and performance, and that publishers can see which were accepted. Since August 2025, publishers under restrictions are limited to a small number of terms and a single block per page.
Forced keywords are attractive because the publisher can steer visitors toward expensive queries. That is also the danger. Stuffing a page about gardening with terms about personal injury lawyers is keyword stuffing: the terms do not match what the visitor came for, clicks do not convert, and the mismatch is visible to Google through referrerAdCreative. Choose terms a reader of that article would plausibly search next.