Ad Settings Verdict / Google Ads

Google Search Partners: on or off?

The community's evidence-backed call on Google Search Partners, the reasoning behind it, and, because it is not the same for everyone, when the call flips.

The verdict

Disable

Disable 78%Enable 22%
StrongEvidence
MediumConfidence
23Sources weighed

Score reflects weighted evidence consensus across web and practitioner sources, not a statistical calculation.

Read this first

Your account can land differently.

This is the community's default call, weighed across the general evidence. Whether Google Search Partners helps or hurts still varies from account to account: your business type, budget, vertical, goals, and how your conversion tracking is set up all move the answer. Plenty of accounts get the opposite result from the default and are right to.

Treat the verdict as a strong starting position, not a universal rule. The when to disable and when to enable split further down is exactly where that variation lives: find your situation there, then confirm it on your own account before you commit. The most reliable answer is always the one your own test gives you.

What it does

When enabled, your Search campaigns extend beyond Google.com to hundreds of third-party sites that have partnered with Google to display search ads. These include properties like YouTube search, Google Maps, Amazon, Walmart, and a long tail of smaller partner sites. Google bundles all partner traffic under a single 'Search Partners' segment, so you cannot exclude individual sites, bid differently by partner site, or see placement-level performance data. It is auto-enabled on every new Search campaign by default.

The recommendation

Disable Search Partners across all active campaigns as the default position, then selectively re-enable it only after deliberate testing. The core problem is structural: Google provides no site-level reporting, so you cannot identify which partners are wasting spend or corrupting your conversion data. Disabling it removes that risk immediately and simplifies your bidding signals.

If you want to test partners on specific campaigns, isolate them by duplicating the campaign, enabling partners only on the duplicate, and running both in parallel for at least four to six weeks. The key metric to track is not CPA or CTR within Google Ads but downstream quality: sales close rate, qualified lead rate, or revenue per conversion. Surface-level metrics from the partners segment frequently look comparable to Google-only while masking serious quality issues at the pipeline level.

For any campaign already running with partners enabled and no prior segmented analysis, pull a network segment report (Segment by Network, including Search Partners) and compare conversion rates and volume between the two segments. If partners represent a meaningful share of spend but cannot be validated for quality, disable immediately and reallocate that budget to Google-only or broader match testing instead.

Weighing it up

Reasons to enable

  • Extends reach beyond Google.com to additional inventory, useful when search volume for core keywords is limited and you need scale
  • Some high-quality partners (Amazon, Walmart, YouTube) can deliver genuinely intent-driven traffic for certain ecommerce verticals
  • Can reduce average CPCs in some accounts due to lower competition on partner sites, improving efficiency on the surface

Reasons to disable

  • Zero placement-level transparency: you cannot see which partner sites are driving traffic, making optimization and exclusion impossible at the site level
  • Widely reported lead quality degradation, including spam submissions, bot traffic, and click fraud from lower-quality partner sites that resell Google inventory
  • Performance metrics can look deceptively healthy at the aggregate level (low CPA, decent CTR) while hiding poor downstream lead or revenue quality
  • Smart bidding models train on all Search Partners conversions equally, so junk conversions from bad partners can corrupt your bidding strategy over time
  • Cannot run Search Partners in isolation; toggling it off requires disabling it per campaign individually

When the call flips

This is where your account fits in.

Disable when

  • You are running lead gen campaigns where lead quality matters and you cannot validate downstream revenue or sales quality from the partner segment
  • Your account is in an early learning phase and you want clean, controllable signals feeding Smart Bidding
  • You are on a constrained budget and need every dollar concentrated on the highest-intent, most transparent inventory
  • You have seen unexplained spikes in form fills, call conversions, or clicks without corresponding revenue or pipeline movement

Consider enabling when

  • You have exhausted Google-only volume for your core keywords and need incremental scale without moving to a broader match strategy
  • You are running branded campaigns where partner sites like Amazon or YouTube can reinforce brand presence with low incremental risk
  • You have segmented partners into a separate campaign (to isolate data), confirmed with a 4-to-6-week test that lead quality downstream matches Google-only quality, and have strong conversion tracking to catch quality degradation early

What this looks like in an account

  • A branded keyword campaign enabled on Search Partners shows ads on Yelp and Amazon search results, where intent and audience quality differ significantly from Google.com
  • A lead gen campaign reports lower CPA from partners, but the sales team flags a spike in spam and job-seeker form fills that originated entirely from the partner segment
  • A non-branded ecommerce campaign sees partner traffic inflate click volume but deliver lower ROAS than the Google-only segment over a 30-day window

How we reached this

This verdict is produced by the Shared Learnings engine, which weighs live web evidence and practitioner discussion against real A/B tests from the community, scored by source authority and recency. This run drew on 23 sources. As the community logs first-party tests on this setting, the verdict updates to reflect what those tests actually found. More on the methodology.

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