Naver is retiring another quality score. On 23 October the Naver Ads operations team announced a new metric for Shopping Search Ads called the Click Expectation Index (클릭기대지수). It goes live on Wednesday 25 November 2026. On the same day, the old Quality Index for those ad types stops being shown.
The first line of the notice is the interesting part: “Ad exposure is changing in the direction of being determined by a range of AI-based factors, such as the relevance between product information and the search query, and real-time user response.” That is Naver saying in plain Korean that the shopping auction is no longer something a seven-bar gauge can explain.
What’s changing
According to the notice:
- Scope: Shopping Search Ads, in the shopping-mall product (쇼핑몰 상품형) and product catalogue (제품 카탈로그형) ad group types.
- Granularity: one score per creative (소재). Powerlink’s Click Expectation Index is given per keyword, so this one is different.
- Scale: 1 to 10, replacing the old seven-step bar. Naver says the finer scale lets advertisers check quality “in more detail”.
- Basis: the creative’s past click-through rate. The score shows how likely it is to be clicked compared with others.
- No impressions, no score: creatives without recent valid impressions show “-“.
- Where you see it: Ad Centre only, under Ad management > Shopping Search > Campaign > ad group > Creatives. It is not in bulk-download reports or the API.
- Not a ranking factor in itself: Naver says the index is a reference metric to help you check creatives, and “does not itself determine whether an ad is shown or its order”.
- Compare within type: scores are calculated separately for each ad group type. Don’t compare mall-product scores with catalogue scores.
At the same time, the existing Quality Index for these creatives disappears from the Ad Centre. In the “Quality Index Master” bulk download, those shopping creatives will show system defaults instead of real values. If you have a dashboard or script that reads that column, it will quietly start reporting nonsense after 25 November. Fix it now. Korean trade site i-boss summarised the change the same way: a 1–10 CTR-based index from 25 November, with the old Quality Index ending the same day, and no direct effect on rank.
Naver’s advice for low scorers is the predictable list: review the product name, the image, and the price or benefit information.
The wider pattern: Korea’s ad auctions are going personal
In the same week, Karrot (당근), Korea’s hyperlocal marketplace and community app, gave more detail on a change it first posted on its official site on 8 October: from 9 November it will change how it ranks search ads. Digital Daily reports that the change covers all search ads in both Easy and Expert mode. Ranking will look beyond bid, ad quality and query relevance to include the relevance of the creative and landing page, and the likelihood that this particular user responds. Two people typing the same query can see different ads.
Karrot told the paper that a high bid does not guarantee a position or continued exposure. The scoring formula won’t be published, and the actual cost per click won’t exceed the bid. This is the latest step in a year of search-ad expansion for Karrot: quality-weighted ranking for local business ads from March last year, ads under neighbourhood community posts in April, the neighbourhood map in July, and a “promote your Bizprofile” campaign goal on 16 October that matches creatives to queries without keyword lists (i-boss has a summary too).
Put that next to Naver’s own move. On 22 October we reported that the Ad Centre becomes “N Ads” on 4 November, with AI recommendations and a “why isn’t my ad showing” assistant. The direction is the same across Korean platforms: less transparent levers, more model-driven delivery, and diagnostics in place of controls.
Dan’s take
I’d welcome the finer scale and be sceptical of the framing. A 1–10 score built on historical CTR tells you how a creative has performed. It is a rear-view mirror, not a forecast. “It doesn’t decide your rank” is technically true and practically misleading. Naver has just told us that relevance and real-time user response decide exposure, and CTR is the most visible proxy for both. A creative stuck at 3 is a creative the auction isn’t favouring.
Two practical points. First, because the index is Ad Centre only, with no API and no bulk report, agencies running large catalogues will need to sample it by hand or build new processes before Q4 peak trading. Second, it is per creative, so you finally have a Naver-native signal for testing product titles and images against each other within the same ad group. Use it the way Google advertisers use asset ratings: as a prompt to test, not as truth.
The lesson goes well beyond Korea. Every engine we cover is moving from scores you can optimise to models you can only feed. Clean product data, sharp titles and strong images are the inputs you still control. More in Naver News.