Google Search Partners is enabled by default on new Search campaigns, spends part of your budget on sites that are not Google, and gives you almost no visibility into which ones. Whether it is worth keeping is genuinely testable in about two weeks, and for a lot of small advertisers the answer turns out to be no — which makes this one of the cheapest performance wins available.
What Search Partners actually is
It is a network of non-Google websites that show Google search results and ads: other search engines, site-search boxes on third-party sites, and various directories and portals. When someone searches on one of those properties, your ad can appear alongside the results.
The important structural fact is this: Google does not give you a per-site breakdown of Search Partners performance, and you cannot exclude individual partner sites. You get one aggregated segment and a single on/off switch. That is a meaningful difference from the Display Network, where placement reports and exclusions both exist.
Why it deserves scrutiny
Not because it is fraudulent — that would be overstating it, and plenty of accounts see perfectly reasonable results from it. The issue is the combination of three things:
- It is on by default, so most advertisers never made a decision about it.
- Intent varies enormously across partner sites. Someone using a site's internal search box is in a very different frame of mind from someone typing a query into Google, even for the same words.
- You cannot inspect or exclude individual sites, so when performance is poor there is no surgical fix — only on or off.
That last point is what makes it worth a deliberate test rather than ongoing optimisation. There is nothing to optimise.
How to see what it is costing you
In Google Ads, open a Search campaign, go to the Segment control on your reporting table, and choose Network (with search partners). This splits every metric into "Google search" and "Search partners" rows.
Compare the two rows on:
- Conversion rate — the headline number.
- Cost per conversion — more honest than conversion rate alone, since CPCs differ between the networks.
- CTR — a partner CTR dramatically higher than your Google Search CTR is worth a second look rather than a celebration. Unusually high engagement with unusually low conversion is a recognised pattern of low-quality traffic; the same signal is discussed in how to tell if your Google Ads clicks are real.
Compare against real outcomes if you can. Conversion rate here means whatever you told Google a conversion is — usually a form fill. If partner traffic fills in forms at a respectable rate but those enquiries never answer the phone, the segment report will look fine while the traffic is worthless. This is the exact gap offline conversion imports close.
Running the test
- Record two to four weeks of segmented data, depending on your volume. Below roughly 100 clicks per network the numbers are too noisy to act on.
- If partner performance is comparable to Google Search, leave it on. It is incremental reach at similar efficiency, which is exactly what you want.
- If it is materially worse, turn it off: campaign Settings → Networks, and untick Include Google search partners.
- Watch total conversion volume for two weeks afterward. You are checking that you removed waste rather than removing reach — if overall conversions drop roughly in proportion to the spend you cut, partners were pulling their weight after all and you should switch it back on.
That last step is the one people skip, and it matters. Turning something off always improves your cost per conversion on paper simply because the worse-performing half is gone. What you need to know is whether total business went down.
The broader pattern this belongs to
Search Partners is one instance of a recurring situation in Google Ads: a default setting that spends your money somewhere you did not specifically choose, with reporting too coarse to evaluate properly. Automatically-included display and app placements are another.
The durable defence is not auditing each one forever. It is making sure the conversions Google optimises toward are real customers rather than form submissions — because a placement that produces submissions but no revenue then stops attracting budget on its own, without you having to find it first. That is the argument for reporting offline conversions, and it is what Claudphic Ads is built around: the click ID travels with the lead, and marking it Won tells Google what actually worked.