Google Search Partners: What They Are & When to Opt Out

Google Search Partners are third-party websites and Google-owned properties, outside Google.com itself, that show Google search ads on their own search results and directory pages. For most advertisers, the setting is ticked by default when a Search campaign is created, which means your ads may already be running on sites you have never heard of, let alone chosen.

That is not automatically a bad thing. It is extra reach at the same cost-per-click model you already use. But if you run a plumbing firm, an HVAC company or any local service business where every click costs real money, “my ads show somewhere, on sites Google mostly does not name” deserves a closer look than a default checkbox usually gets.

This guide explains what the Google Search Partners network actually is, what has changed in 2025 and 2026 (quite a lot, including the removal of parked domains in February 2026), how to check what partner traffic is doing to your budget, and how to decide, with your own data rather than internet folklore, whether to leave the setting on.

What are Google Search Partners?

Google Search Partners are sites in the Search Network that partner with Google to show ads alongside their own search results, site directories and product pages. For Google Ads advertisers, this means a campaign built for Google search can also serve ads on hundreds of non-Google websites, plus YouTube search results and watch pages, without any extra setup.

Google’s own definition of search partners describes the placements: search results pages, site directory pages, product detail pages, and YouTube. Users might trigger your ad by typing into a partner site’s search box, tapping a suggested search, or clicking a related search term on a page. You are charged when someone clicks your ad, exactly as you are on Google search itself.

Two details matter more than the definition, though.

First, Google has never published a complete Google search partners list. YouTube is confirmed, and over the years advertisers have identified partners such as smaller search engines and large retail or directory sites through their own reports. But there is no official public register you can review before opting in. You agree to the network as a whole, not to named sites.

Second, the setting is opt-out, not opt-in. When you build a Search campaign, the network settings include a ticked box that reads “Include Google search partners”. Leave it as it is and partner sites are part of your campaign from day one. Plenty of business owners only discover the network exists when they spot the “Search partners” row in a segmented report and wonder what it is.

If terms like impressions, networks and invalid traffic are still new to you, our click fraud glossary covers the vocabulary this article leans on.

What changed for Google Search Partners in 2025 and 2026

The short version: Google has spent the last two years cleaning up the search partner network, and it is now more transparent and better quality than it has ever been, though still not something to leave entirely unwatched. This matters because most of the advice you will find online about search partners predates these changes.

The clean-up has some history behind it. In late 2023, research by the ad transparency firm Adalytics raised questions about where search partner ads could end up, and shortly afterwards Google gave Performance Max advertisers the ability to opt out of search partners, something that had not been possible before. That was the start of a longer programme.

Since then, the changes have come steadily. In August 2025, Google introduced full placement reporting for the search partner network, giving advertisers site-level impression data for Search, Shopping and App campaigns for the first time. Advertisers had been asking for this for the best part of two decades. In January 2026, Performance Max gained channel reporting with search partner segmentation, and account-level placement exclusions arrived, letting one exclusion list apply across Performance Max, Demand Gen, YouTube and Display at once.

Then came the biggest quality change of all. On 10 February 2026, Google removed parked domains entirely as an ad surface within the search partner network. Parked domains, empty websites that existed mainly to display ads, were for years the most complained-about corner of the network: no real content, no real intent, and conversion rates to match. They are now gone, automatically, from every account.

Google clearly believes the improved network performs. In December 2025 it published its own figures claiming that advertisers with at least 5% of spend on search partners typically saw an 11% uplift in conversions with volume-focused Smart Bidding, and a 7% uplift in conversion value with value-focused strategies. Read the small print, though. Both claims apply only to campaigns that were not constrained by budget, which rules out a great many local service accounts, and they are Google’s numbers about Google’s own network. Treat them as a claim rather than a law of nature, while noting how much the company has invested in making the network defensible.

The traffic quality question that will not go away

Even after the clean-up, the honest position is this: search partner traffic is more variable than traffic from Google.com, because it comes from many different sites with many different audiences, and you cannot vet those sites in advance. That variability is the whole debate in one sentence.

There are structural reasons to stay watchful. The web that partner sites live on is rougher than it used to be. According to the Imperva and Thales Bad Bot Report, automated traffic overtook human activity in 2024 at 51% of all web traffic, with malicious bots accounting for 37%. And the IAS Media Quality Report found campaigns without anti-fraud technology ran a 10.9% ad fraud rate, fifteen times higher than protected campaigns. We keep the full, sourced set of numbers on our click fraud statistics page if you want to dig into them.

None of this means search partner clicks are mostly fake. It means the network inherits the general condition of the wider web, and Google’s filtering, good as it is, was built to protect the ecosystem as a whole rather than your individual campaign. We have written before about where Google’s invalid click protection stops, and everything in that piece applies with slightly more force to clicks arriving from sites you cannot name.

There is also a subtler cost than wasted clicks. If partner traffic converts differently from Google search traffic, and it usually does in one direction or the other, it feeds different signals into automated bidding. Enough noisy signals and Smart Bidding starts optimising toward the noise, a mechanism we unpack in our post on how bad traffic trains Google’s algorithm against you. A network segment that “only” spends 10% of your budget can still have an outsized effect on where the other 90% goes.

How to check your own Google search partners performance

You can settle the on-or-off question for your account in about fifteen minutes with two reports, and your own data beats anyone else’s opinion. Here is the routine we recommend.

Segment by network. In your campaign report, add the segment “Network (with search partners)”. This splits every metric, impressions, clicks, cost, conversions, into Google search versus search partners. You now know exactly what the partner network costs you and what it returns. Many advertisers discover it is a small slice of spend; some discover it is a third of their clicks.

Open the placement report. Since August 2025, you can see the actual sites. Look for search partner placement reporting in your campaign reports and scan the list. You are looking for the same things we flag in our guide to detecting click fraud: placements sending clicks with near-zero engagement, sites wildly unrelated to your service, and anything with a click-through rate that looks too good to be true.

Compare the numbers that matter. For a local service business the test is simple: cost per lead by network. If search partners deliver enquiries at a comparable cost to Google search, the extra reach is working. If the partner row shows plenty of clicks and a conversion rate near zero, you have found a leak. It is the same diagnostic logic as our guide for when your budget is running out faster than it should, applied to one segment.

While you are in the report, check the timing too. Partner traffic that arrives in bursts, at odd hours, or from geographies you do not serve carries the classic signatures of automated activity rather than customers.

Should you turn off Google search partners?

Turn search partners off if the segment’s cost per conversion is clearly worse than Google search and you have given it enough data to judge; keep it on, and monitor it, if it converts at an acceptable cost. That is the whole framework. The setting is not a moral question, it is a line in a report.

That said, some patterns show up often enough to be worth naming for our audience of home services businesses and small advertisers:

If your budget is limited, and most local service budgets are, every pound spent on an unvetted partner site is a pound unavailable for the highest-intent traffic there is: someone typing “emergency electrician near me” into Google itself. Budget-limited campaigns rarely need more reach; they need better spend. It is also worth remembering that Google’s own uplift figures were measured on campaigns that were not budget-constrained, so they were never a promise to advertisers in your position. A plumber in Leeds does not have a visibility problem on Google search, they have a competition problem, and partner sites do not fix that. This is the same budget-first logic our plumber click fraud protection page applies to fraud generally.

If the segment is tiny, say under 5% of spend, it is usually not worth agonising over either way. Check it quarterly and move on.

If you do turn it off, the mechanics take a minute: campaign settings, Networks, untick “Include Google search partners”. The setting is per campaign, so repeat it for each one. Performance Max campaigns have their own opt-out, which as covered above has existed since the Adalytics episode. Note that turning partners off applies to YouTube search placements from this network too; you are switching off the whole partner network, not choosing sites within it.

And if you keep it on, treat the placement report as a standing appointment. The February 2026 parked domain removal took out the worst inventory, but “better than before” is not the same as “clean”, and new placements appear as new partners join.

Where protection fits, whichever way you decide

Whether search partners stay on or not, the underlying problem they highlight, that you pay for clicks without knowing much about who is clicking, applies to your whole account. Turning off a network setting removes one variable. It does not tell you which of the remaining clicks were bots, competitors or click farms, and it does not stop repeat offenders coming back through Google search itself.

That visibility layer is what ClickGuardian adds. It analyses the behaviour of every click on your ads, whichever network served them, scores each visitor in real time, and blocks the sources that keep wasting your money, while giving you a plain-English record of what was caught. For the clicks Google’s own filtering misses, that record is also the evidence base for deciding questions exactly like this one, because you stop guessing what “Search partners: 412 clicks” actually contained.

If you want to know what that is worth in pounds before you commit to anything, our ROI calculator takes your monthly spend and industry and shows what invalid clicks are likely costing you right now. It is free, it takes about a minute, and it turns this whole debate into numbers for your business rather than someone else’s.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are Google Search Partners?

Google Search Partners are websites and Google-owned properties outside Google.com that show Google search ads on their search results pages, site directories and product pages. The network includes YouTube search results and watch pages plus hundreds of non-Google websites. Ads on partner sites use the same pay-per-click model as Google search, and the “Include Google search partners” setting is ticked by default on new Search campaigns.

Can I see a list of Google search partner sites?

Google does not publish a complete list of search partner sites, but since August 2025 advertisers can see site-level placement reporting showing which partner sites actually served their ads and how many impressions each one generated. YouTube is the one partner Google confirms by name. To see your own data, check the search partner placement reports in your Google Ads account rather than searching for a public list, because no official one exists.

Should I turn off search partners in Google Ads?

Turn off search partners if your segmented reports show the network delivers conversions at a clearly worse cost than Google search, and keep it on if it converts at an acceptable cost. Segment your campaigns by “Network (with search partners)” and compare cost per conversion between the two rows. For budget-limited local service campaigns, spending your full budget on Google search itself is often the safer default, because that is where the highest-intent searches happen.

Do search partner clicks cost the same as Google search clicks?

You are charged per click on search partner sites using the same auction-based model as Google search, though the actual cost per click on partner sites is often lower because there is less competition for those placements. Cheaper clicks are only a bargain if they convert, so judge the network on cost per lead or sale rather than cost per click alone.

Does Google filter invalid clicks on search partner sites?

Yes, Google applies its invalid click filtering across the whole Search Network, including search partner sites, so clicks it identifies as invalid are filtered or credited automatically. The limitation is the same as on Google search: sophisticated bots and repeat manual clickers can pass those filters, and on partner sites you have less context about where traffic originated. Google removed parked domains, historically the lowest-quality partner inventory, from the network entirely on 10 February 2026.

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Last updated: September 2026. For the wider category this traffic belongs to, see what is invalid traffic?, and for the practical playbook, how to stop click fraud on Google Ads. For why the platform’s own filtering leaves gaps, see why Google’s invalid click protection isn’t enough and how bad traffic trains Smart Bidding against you. For the sourced numbers behind this article, see the click fraud statistics page. To estimate what invalid clicks are costing your own campaigns, use the ClickGuardian ROI calculator.