The New Performance Max Partners Setting: Your Operator Playbook

Google withdrew the Search Partners opt-out from Performance Max advertisers in March 2024. It is now quietly handing it back to a few of them. A new Partners (Alpha) setting inside PMax campaigns lets you decide whether your ads run on Search Partners and on the Google Display Network, and until this pilot both networks were bundled into every PMax campaign with no way out.

The feature was spotted by PPC growth strategist Saquib Syed on LinkedIn and confirmed by Search Engine Land on July 15, 2026. Google has since gone on the record about it. Access is being handed out unevenly, there is no request path that reliably works, and Google’s own API documentation still says the thing the interface now does is impossible. Here is what the setting does, why it exists at all, and what to check in your account this week.

What the New Performance Max Partners Setting Actually Does

The new performance max partners setting lives inside your PMax campaign settings and gives you two independent toggles. One controls Search Partners, the network of non-Google sites that show search-style ads next to their own results. The other controls the Google Display Network, which Google describes in its Display campaigns documentation as reaching people across “35 million websites and apps” plus YouTube and Gmail.

Before this pilot, PMax served across both networks automatically. No exclusion box, no exemption request, no supported workaround. Your budget went wherever Google decided, and the reporting broke performance out by asset group rather than by network.

Google has now commented on it. A company spokesperson told Digiday on July 24, 2026: “This is a pilot launched with a limited group of advertisers. At the same time, our North Star has been empowering advertisers with clear visibility and new ways to confidently steer PMax campaigns.” The same spokesperson declined to say why Google added the feature, or when it might become broadly available. Read what that does and does not say. Google confirmed the pilot and confirmed it is limited, which is more than we usually get on an unannounced alpha, but it gave no rollout date, no geography, and no way in.

The access story is the part that changes what you should do today. Digiday reported that buyers at three media agencies asked their Google reps for access and were turned down, while other buyers found the checkboxes sitting in their dashboard with no notice at all. Brian Pappas of Moroch told Digiday his team had the feature in the final week of June, before the July 15 sighting that put the story into the trade press. So the rollout is not running on a schedule anyone outside Google can read. Go look in your own campaign settings, because asking for access is the one approach documented not to work.

The API still says this is impossible

If you manage PMax through automation rather than the interface, there is a contradiction worth knowing about. Google’s Ads API campaign documentation files Performance Max under the heading “No Manual Control” and states plainly: “It automatically serves your ads across all of Google’s networks (for example, Search, Display, and YouTube) to find conversions. You cannot opt out of specific networks.” The same page names NetworkSettings as the field that includes or excludes Search Partners and the Display Network, and scopes it to Search campaigns.

So the interface now offers a control the API documentation says does not exist. There is no field to read and none to set. That is ordinary for an interface alpha, and it has one practical consequence: if you run scripts or a third-party bid platform across dozens of PMax campaigns, this toggle is a manual click in each one until a field appears in the docs.

Google Removed This Control in 2024. The Alpha Gives It Back.

The Partners alpha reads like a new feature. It is closer to a reversal. Performance Max advertisers could exclude themselves from the Search Partner Network for about twelve weeks over the winter of 2023, and then Google withdrew that ability and offered visibility in its place. Everything since has been a slow, partial rebuild of the same control.

When	What Google changed	What it left advertisers with
Nov 28, 2023	Adalytics publishes research on the network. Of 51,280 sites it found embedding Google Custom Search, it says 36,612 showed evidence of search ads, including roughly 21,454 parked domains. Google disputed the report.	The first detailed outside look at where partner ads ran.
Dec 6, 2023	Google temporarily lets advertisers exclude all campaign types, Performance Max included.	An opt-out, explicitly labelled temporary.
Mar 1, 2024	The temporary opt-out expires.	Nothing. PMax advertisers are back in, with no way out.
Mar 4, 2024	Search partner sites are added to the PMax placement report, and account-level site exclusions are extended to the network.	See the sites, exclude them one by one.
Apr 2025	Third-party pre-screen brand safety arrives, with curated exclusion lists from DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science and Zefr.	Someone else curates your exclusions.
Jan 2026	Search partners is split out as its own line in PMax channel reporting, across all accounts.	The network’s cost becomes visible on its own.
Feb 10, 2026	Parked domains “cease to be an ad surface within the search partners network”.	The largest category Adalytics flagged is removed.
Apr 2026	The Invalid Activity Credit Report arrives for Search and Performance Max.	Invalid-traffic credits become readable per network.
Jul 2026	The Partners (Alpha) toggle appears in a limited set of accounts.	The control withdrawn in March 2024, handed back.

Read down that table and the shape of the last three years is hard to miss. Google’s answer to every criticism of the network was transparency rather than choice. See where your ads ran. Exclude the sites you object to. Buy a third-party list if you would rather someone else did the curating. All of that is genuinely useful, and none of it is the same thing as being able to say no. The Partners alpha is the first time since March 2024 that a Performance Max advertiser can decline the network outright.

The reason this lands harder in lead generation than in retail is a quality argument, not a reach argument. Performance Max optimizes toward whatever you count as a conversion, so a stream of cheap, low-intent form fills does not merely waste budget, it teaches the campaign to go and find more of the same. We make that case in full in our guides to ad fraud in lead generation and OTP verification, stopping Performance Max spam leads, handling invalid clicks in Google Ads, and auditing your placement exclusions.

Why the Performance Max Partners Setting Is a Bigger Deal Than It Looks

PMax has always traded control for automation. You hand Google your creative, your conversion goal, and your budget, and the system picks headlines, placements, and bids across every network it offers. For accounts with clean conversion signals that trade has often worked well. For accounts with messy signals it has been an expensive act of faith.

Google’s own numbers argue for leaving Search Partners on, and you should know them before you switch anything off. On its Search Partner Network page, Google states that advertisers “where Search Partner Network spend was at least 5% of their ad spend, can typically experience a 11% uplift in conversions when using volume-focused Smart Bidding strategies (Target CPA or Maximize Conversions), specifically in campaigns that were not constrained by budget.” The value-focused version is a 7 percent uplift in conversion value, under the same condition.

That condition does the heavy lifting. If your PMax campaign is budget capped, and most lead generation accounts are, Google’s own uplift claim is not describing your account. Google also discloses no sample size, no time period, and no methodology behind either figure. None of that makes the numbers false. It makes them a reason to measure your own cost per lead rather than taking either side on faith, and the partners setting is the first controlled test you can run inside PMax without leaving the campaign type: same campaign, same creative, same budget, one variable.

How to Test the Performance Max Partners Setting Without Wrecking Your Account

If the setting shows up, resist the urge to flip both toggles off on Monday morning. That is the fastest way to spook your Smart Bidding model and end up with a bad week that has nothing to do with the network mix.

Run a real experiment instead. Pick your best-performing PMax campaign, the one with a stable cost per acquisition and enough weekly conversions that a two-week read means something. Turn off Search Partners only, leave Display on, and hold every other setting still, including daily budget and your Target CPA or Target ROAS value. Screenshot the settings page first, because there is no change-history entry for a setting that does not officially exist.

Watch four numbers over 14 to 21 days:

• Cost per qualified lead, not cost per conversion. Pull the leads your CRM marked contactable and in-market, and divide spend by that count. If raw conversions fall but qualified cost per lead improves, the test succeeded. This is the number the incumbent write-ups skip.
• Total conversion volume. If volume collapses, you were leaning on Search Partners for cheap conversions. Whether you want them back depends entirely on the first number.
• Channel-level cost. The PMax channel performance report carries conversions, conversion value and cost by channel, and since January 2026 Google has split Search partners out as its own line across all accounts.
• Asset group shape. If asset group performance shifts, Google is rebalancing which creative it serves, and that is a second variable you need to know about before you read the result.

Know the limit of your reporting before you start. The Search Partners placement report lists the sites your campaigns served on and the impressions each received, and that is all it lists. There is no cost and no conversion figure per site, and Google’s own placement-report documentation warns it “shouldn’t be used to evaluate performance”. Per placement you are blind. Per channel you are not, which is why the channel report and your CRM are the instruments this test actually runs on. Worth knowing about too, because almost nobody has written about it: the Invalid Activity Credit Report Google added in April 2026 covers Search and Performance Max and shows credit issued for invalid traffic, with adjusted cost, clicks and conversion rate by campaign and network.

For accounts on value-based bidding, add revenue per lead. As we cover in value-based bidding for lead generation, the trap when you switch off a partner network is losing cheap conversions that were inflating your reported ROAS. That is not a loss. That is a cleanup.

What the Partners Setting Does Not Do

Four honest limits, because the trade coverage has been unusually excited about this one.

• No placement-level economics. You can switch a network off, but you still cannot see what any individual partner site cost you or converted at. You are making a whole-network decision on whole-network evidence.
• No API field. No bulk edit, no scripted rollout, until one ships.
• Not a lead-quality control. Switching a network off changes where your ads run. It does nothing about the leads arriving from the networks you kept.
• Not available on request. Three agencies asked and were refused. Plan around checking, not asking.

The Real Playbook, Vertical by Vertical

The setting will not deliver the same result in every vertical, because the two networks fail differently depending on what qualifies your lead.

Your vertical	Test this toggle first	Why that one	The number that settles it
HVAC, roofing, plumbing, restoration	Search Partners off	Urgent, high-intent local searches. Partner-site search ads sit furthest from the moment someone picks up the phone.	Cost per qualified call
U65 health and ACA	Search Partners off	Enrollment demand is heavily aggregated and heavily arbitraged, so partner inventory is where the gap between a form fill and a licensed-agent conversation opens widest.	Cost per contactable, in-market lead
Solar	Search Partners off, Display stays on	Solar buyers take weeks to decide, and Display retargeting earns its place in that window.	Cost per held appointment
Auto and life insurance	Both, staggered two weeks apart	Quote-shopping intent shows up on both networks. Run them in sequence or you will not know which one moved the number.	Cost per qualified lead, read per network
Financial and precious metals, including gold IRA	Display off	Display is the bigger adjacency risk for a financial-audience buyer, as we cover in our gold IRA display placement controls post.	Cost per qualified lead, plus a placement review

Treat each toggle as an account-level policy, not a per-campaign whim. If a test tells you Search Partners produces traffic your business cannot use, set it off across every PMax campaign that has the toggle, and write the decision down where the next person to touch the account will find it. Our template for real-time Google Ads policy reviews shows how to keep that documentation useful rather than ceremonial.

Expect your creative to get judged faster. A smaller network mix exposes weak headlines and weak landing pages sooner, so if you run Asset Studio inside PMax, the workflow in wiring Asset Studio into PMax keeps per-variant cost per lead visible. Keep a nightly anomaly check running through the test week: a small change on Monday, a clean read by Friday.

A Second Manual Control Just Showed Up in Performance Max

The partners toggle is not an isolated event. On July 24, 2026, Search Engine Land reported that household income exclusions had been spotted inside a European Performance Max campaign, a find paid search specialist Thomas Eccel shared on LinkedIn. The setting lists seven brackets, from the top 10 percent of household income down to the lower 50 percent and unknown. Treat it as unconfirmed: Google has not documented it and has not commented on it, and it is one sighting in one European campaign.

The pattern is what to take away. Two manual controls surfaced inside PMax within about ten days of each other, both without an announcement. If you buy leads and calls, plan on that being the shape of things, because the levers come back quietly and land in your account before anyone tells you. Household income exclusions would matter most where income qualifies the lead rather than intent does. Under 65 health, final expense, and Medicare traffic all price differently by income band, and today you sort that out after the fact by scoring the lead or the call. A campaign-level exclusion would move that work upstream.

Your Next 30 Days Testing the New Toggle

Log into Google Ads today and check whether the new performance max partners setting is visible in any of your PMax campaigns. If it is, screenshot the current state before you touch anything, then pick one campaign for a two-week test. Turn Search Partners off, leave Display on, and set a calendar reminder for day 14 to read cost per qualified lead against your channel report. If you sell into a financial or precious metals vertical, flip the test.

If the setting stays hidden in your account this month, put a weekly reminder on your calendar to check the settings yourself, and do not spend the month chasing your rep for access. Google has a habit of quiet alpha rollouts that reach more accounts every few weeks without an announcement, and this one turned up in dashboards with no notice at all.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I opt out of Search Partners in Performance Max?

Only if the Partners (Alpha) setting has appeared in your account. Where it has, PMax campaign settings show two independent checkboxes, one for Search Partners and one for the Google Display Network. Where it has not, there is still no exclusion box and no supported workaround, which was the situation for every PMax advertiser after March 2024. Google confirmed to Digiday on July 24, 2026 that this is a pilot limited to a small group of advertisers, and gave no date for wider availability.

How do I get access to the Performance Max Partners alpha?

There is no documented request path, and asking is the one approach reported not to work. Digiday reported on July 24, 2026 that buyers at three separate media agencies asked their Google representatives for access and were turned down, while other advertisers found the checkboxes already sitting in their dashboards with no notice. One agency had the feature in the final week of June, before the sighting that made it public news. Check your PMax campaign settings yourself on a weekly cadence, and plan your quarter as though the toggle will not arrive.

Is there a Google Ads API field for the partners setting?

No. Google’s Ads API campaign documentation still files Performance Max under “No Manual Control” and states that PMax “automatically serves your ads across all of Google’s networks (for example, Search, Display, and YouTube) to find conversions. You cannot opt out of specific networks.” The NetworkSettings field that includes or excludes Search Partners and the Display Network is scoped to Search campaigns. So this is an interface-only alpha, and if you manage dozens of PMax campaigns through scripts, the toggle is a manual click in each one.

Does turning off Search Partners reduce conversions?

It can, and Google publishes a claim that it does. Google states that advertisers whose Search Partner Network spend was at least 5 percent of their ad spend “can typically experience a 11% uplift in conversions” on Target CPA or Maximize Conversions, and a 7 percent uplift in conversion value on value-focused strategies. Both claims apply only to campaigns that were not constrained by budget, and Google discloses no sample size, time period or methodology. If your campaign is budget capped, that claim is not describing your account.

What should I measure instead of raw conversions?

Cost per qualified lead, taken from your CRM rather than the Google Ads conversion column. Performance Max optimizes toward whatever you count as a conversion, so a campaign fed on raw form fills will learn to find more form fills regardless of whether anyone answers the phone. Pull the leads your CRM marked contactable and in-market, divide spend by that count, and compare the before and after windows. The channel performance report is the other half of the read, and Search partners has been its own line there since January 2026.

If you would rather have another operator look at your account before you touch a live campaign, book a time on our free consultation page and we will walk through your PMax setup and map your best test candidate on the call. Let’s Grow!