You did not choose Google Search Partners. Nobody does. The box was already ticked when you built the campaign, and it stayed ticked because the traffic looked fine — decent volume, cheap clicks, nothing broken.
That is the problem. Search Partners rarely fail loudly. They take a slice of your budget, return a pile of clicks, and hand back very few leads. On a small Malaysian ad budget, that slice matters.
This guide from ZenWeb covers what the partner network is, what the traffic is actually worth, when keeping it on pays, and how to check your own account first. New to the platform? Start with how Google Ads works. Otherwise, here is the setting itself in two minutes.
Source video: How to Turn Off Search Partners in Google Ads on YouTube
Quick Answer: Google Search Partners are non-Google websites and apps that carry Google’s search ads — other search engines, site directories, product listing pages, and YouTube. They are bundled into the Search Network and included by default in every Search campaign, so your ads run there unless you actively untick the box.
Google’s own Search Network documentation is clear on where these ads land: lists of search results, site directory pages, product detail pages, and YouTube search results and Watch pages. Partners may also restyle the ad — placement, size, formatting and visual style are theirs to adjust.
Two consequences follow, and both bite harder than they look:
One point in the network’s favour: clickthrough rate on partner sites does not feed your Google Ads Quality Score. A weak partner CTR will not drag down what you pay on Google Search. That is also why the damage stays invisible — it surfaces in your cost per lead, never in your Quality Score column.
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Quick Answer: Across ZenWeb-managed Malaysian search campaigns, Search Partner clicks cost about 45% less than Google Search clicks — and convert at roughly a quarter of the rate. The cheaper click is real. It is also the reason the cost per lead ends up nearly double.
The cheap CPC is what keeps this setting switched on. It is also the wrong number to judge it by. What matters is what the click does next — and that is where the two networks part company.
| Metric | Google Search | Search Partners |
|---|---|---|
| Average cost per click | RM 3.40 | RM 1.85 |
| Clickthrough rate | 6.2% | 2.1% |
| Conversion rate | 4.8% | 1.3% |
| Cost per lead | RM 71 | RM 142 |
| Share of total clicks | 91% | 9% |
Source: Aggregated from ZenWeb-managed Google Ads campaigns, Malaysia, 2024–2026. Lead-generation Search campaigns only.
Read the last two rows together. Google Search Partners buys 9% of the clicks at half price, then returns leads at double the cost. It is not free traffic — it is a slice of the same budget, running at half efficiency. If your cost per lead is creeping up, look here first.
Quick Answer: The damage is not spread evenly. Service businesses selling an appointment — home services, tuition centres, B2B — take partner clicks far out of proportion to the leads they get back. Retail and e-commerce come closest to breaking even, because a browsing click still has somewhere useful to go.
The gap between the two bars below is the waste. Where the click bar runs well past the conversion bar, the partner network is buying traffic that never becomes an enquiry.
| Industry | Partner clicks vs partner conversions | Clicks | Conv. |
|---|---|---|---|
| Education & tuition | 14% | 5% | |
| Home services | 11% | 3% | |
| Retail & e-commerce | 9% | 7% | |
| Professional services | 8% | 4% | |
| B2B & industrial | 6% | 2% |
Light bar = share of clicks from Search Partners. Dark bar = share of conversions from Search Partners. Source: ZenWeb client tracking across Malaysian SME Google Ads accounts, 2024–2026.
Education is the worst offender in our accounts, for structural reasons. Tuition and course keywords attract heavy browsing on content and directory sites, so Google Search Partners finds plenty of people willing to click and very few ready to enrol. It is the same trap as irrelevant search terms — volume that looks like demand but is not.
Quick Answer: Opt out if you run a lead-generation business on a modest budget and want every ringgit landing where intent is highest. That describes most Malaysian SMEs. Keeping Search Partners on should be a decision you make with data, not a default you inherit.
The case for opting out rests on four things:
There is a middle path on paper. Google lets you exclude specific webpages and videos instead of the whole network. On Search campaigns it is thin cover — with no placement report to work from, you end up excluding the sites you happened to hear about rather than the ones spending your money.
Note where the switch lives, too. Networks is a campaign-level setting, so a clean Google Ads account structure lets you opt out of one campaign while testing partners on another. It is the lesson the default location targeting setting teaches: Google’s defaults are built for the average advertiser worldwide, and your Klang Valley aircon business is not that advertiser.
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Quick Answer: Impressions and clicks fall. Leads barely move. Across ZenWeb accounts that switched Search Partners off, median monthly clicks dropped about 11% while leads held within 2% — and cost per lead fell from RM 78 to RM 69. You lose traffic, not customers.
This is where most owners lose their nerve. The graph dips, the account goes quiet, and the instinct is to switch it back on. Hold. Traffic is not the product — leads are.
| Median per account, per month | Partners on | Partners off | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Impressions | 41,800 | 32,600 | −22% |
| Clicks | 1,240 | 1,105 | −11% |
| Leads | 58 | 57 | −2% |
| Ad spend | RM 4,520 | RM 3,930 | −13% |
| Cost per lead | RM 78 | RM 69 | −12% |
Source: ZenWeb operational data, Malaysian SME campaigns under management, 60 days before vs 60 days after opting out. Budgets left uncapped; spend fell because the partner impressions stopped.
Two cautions before you read that as a promise. Expect a short wobble first: smart bidding re-learns when the traffic mix changes, so give it a fortnight. If you are still weighing manual CPC against smart bidding, change the network first and let the bidding settle after. And remember your reported numbers shift with your Google Ads attribution model — compare like with like before declaring victory.
Quick Answer: Keep Search Partners on when the network hits your cost-per-acquisition target in your own reporting, when you have exhausted Google Search volume and still have budget, or when you sell products that convert on a browsing click. Keep them on because the data says so — never because the box was already ticked.
A blanket opt-out is lazy advice. There are cases where the network earns its place:
Before keeping the network on purely for reach, though, check you are reaching for the right tool. Search partners are a blunt instrument for top-of-funnel volume — Demand Gen campaigns are built for that job and give you creative control the partner network never will. Chasing phone enquiries? The shift away from call-only ads will move your lead flow further than this setting does, and Google Ads lead forms usually beat partner traffic outright.
One thing you cannot do is bid separately for the partner network. There is no bid adjustment for search partners — unlike device, time and location, where bid adjustments let you dial spend up or down. Here the choice is binary: on, or off.
Quick Answer: Google retired parked domains from the Search Partner Network on 10 February 2026, removing the worst inventory in it. Meanwhile Malaysian advertisers kept walking away — the partner share of ZenWeb-managed search spend fell from 12.4% in 2022 to 4.8% in the first half of 2026.
The 2026 network is a cleaner one than the network that earned the bad reputation. The biggest improvement: parked domains — undeveloped pages sitting on bought-but-unused web addresses — ceased to be an ad surface within the search partner network on 10 February 2026, and the option to include them disappeared from account content-suitability settings altogether.
| Year | Partner share of search spend | Accounts opted out |
|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 12.4% | 31% |
| 2023 | 11.1% | 44% |
| 2024 | 9.6% | 58% |
| 2025 | 7.2% | 72% |
| 2026 (H1) | 4.8% | 84% |
Source: Aggregated from ZenWeb-managed campaigns, Malaysia, 2022–2026 (H1). Search campaigns only; Performance Max excluded, as it carries no network opt-out.
That last footnote is the catch. Performance Max has no networks checkbox, so partner inventory rides along regardless — one more reason to keep a properly structured Search campaign running beside it. Expect Google’s optimisation score recommendations to nudge you to switch partners back on, too. A recommendation is not a verdict on your account.
Want the partner numbers pulled from your own account?
We will segment your last 90 days by network, put a ringgit figure on the partner slice, and tell you plainly whether it is earning its keep. Talk to ZenWeb’s Google Ads team →
Quick Answer: Segment your campaigns by “Network (with search partners)” over the last 90 days, compare cost per conversion between Google Search and Search Partners, then untick “Include Google search partners” under the campaign’s Networks setting. The whole audit takes about twenty minutes.
Do not opt out on our numbers. Opt out on yours:
If the spend justifies the rigour, do not guess — test it properly. Google Ads experiments split traffic between a partners-on and partners-off variant, so you read a clean result instead of arguing about seasonality. And if the test straddles a festive peak, set your seasonality adjustments first, or Raya demand will muddy it.
Quick Answer: For most Malaysian lead-generation businesses, opting out of Google Search Partners is the right default. The clicks are cheap, the leads are not, and you cannot optimise a network whose placements you are never shown. Check your own segment, then switch it off.
Google Search Partners is not a scandal. It is a setting that Google turned on for you, one that suits some advertisers and quietly costs the rest of them money. Having it enabled was never the mistake. Never having looked is.
So look. Pull the network segment, compare cost per lead honestly, and make the call on your own evidence rather than ours. While you are in the account, the same discipline pays off on your negative keyword list and your click fraud checks. Between them, those three account for most of the wasted spend we find in Malaysian accounts.
Yes. When you create a Search campaign, “Include Google search partners” is ticked for you. Google’s documentation confirms partners are included by default and that you may opt out at any time in campaign settings. Most Malaysian accounts we audit have never had that box touched.
Not on Search campaigns. Google does not report the specific website that showed your ad on the Search Network. Performance Max is the exception — it does surface placements. That blind spot is the strongest single argument for opting out: you cannot exclude what you cannot see.
No. Clickthrough rate on search partner sites does not affect your Quality Score on Google. Turning partners off will not damage your scores, and leaving them on will not improve them — partner CTR never enters the calculation.
No. Performance Max has no networks setting, so partner inventory is included automatically. If you want control over the network, you need a Search campaign — a good reason to keep one running alongside PMax.
In ZenWeb-managed Malaysian accounts, the partner network took 4.8% of search spend in the first half of 2026, down from 12.4% in 2022. In an account that has never touched the setting, expect a bigger slice — nearer the 9–14% of clicks we see across our lead-generation campaigns.
Not sure what the partner network is costing you?
ZenWeb is a Google Partner managing Google Ads for 500+ Malaysian businesses. We will segment your account by network, show you what Search Partners has been buying, and switch it off if the numbers say so.
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