The most common form of air quality monitoring is ambient air monitoring. Ambient air monitoring involves the measurement of "normal" air in urban, industrial and rural areas. These measurements are used to determine the human exposure to pollutants and can be combined with trace/background monitoring as well as stack monitoring to assess an organisations contribution to pollution, and the effect this has compared to natural levels.

Ambient air quality monitoring uses the original and most common gas analyzers in the market. These analyzers can measure a wide variety of gases due to them not having the constraints of measuring trace levels accurately, or have to incorporate stack monitoring adjustments.