Google Ads Lets You Cap Search Partners at 0%, But Not YouTube

Google Ads announced channel prioritization and budget allocation on October 14, 2026, rolling out to Search, Shopping, Performance Max and Demand Gen over the coming months. Every channel defaults to High priority, and Low priority channels can be capped at a percentage of daily budget, down to 0%. In Performance Max, though, Search, YouTube, Maps, Gmail and Discover stay locked together as one bucket.

So the new control is real, and it's useful. It just mostly works on inventory Google doesn't own.

The announcement came from Tal Akabas, Director of Product Management for Google Ads, under the line "Say goodbye to all-or-nothing channel targeting." Search Engine Journal's Brooke Osmundson covered it the same day, and Google published a full Help Center page on how the settings work. I read all three. The press release version and the help doc version tell slightly different stories, which is usually where the interesting part lives.

How the two dials actually work

There are two separate controls here, and it's easy to blur them.

Channel prioritization lets you mark a channel High or Low priority. High priority channels get funded first (within your target, if you run Target CPA or Target ROAS), and whatever budget is left flows to Low priority channels. On a Search campaign, you can set Google Search, Search partners and the Display Network independently.

Budget allocation only applies to Low priority channels. You set a ceiling as a percentage of the campaign's average daily budget, not actual spend. Google's own example: a 5% allocation on a $1,000 average daily budget keeps that channel at or under $50 a day. Set it to 0% and Google stops spending there entirely, which, according to SEJ, works even inside Performance Max. That's new.

You can set this at the account level (with separate defaults per campaign type), override it per campaign, and it works with shared budgets. That last bit matters more than it sounds for anyone running portfolio budgets across a dozen Search campaigns.

The bucket Google won't let you open

The "goodbye to all-or-nothing" line gets a little generous here. For Performance Max and Demand Gen, Google groups Search, YouTube, Maps, Gmail and Discover into a single tier it calls "Google channels." You can't prioritize them individually. You can't tell PMax to fund Search before YouTube.

What you can deprioritize or cap is the stuff on the edges: Search partners and the Display Network. Those are exactly the placements advertisers have complained about most, so in fairness, this answers the loudest complaint. But it doesn't touch the question most PMax managers actually lose sleep over, which is how much of the budget quietly slides from high-intent Search into YouTube and Discover.

We covered a version of that problem recently, when Brainlabs data showed Search gets 41% of Google Ads clicks but still eats 71% of the budget. Knowing where the money goes and being able to steer it are two different things. Think of it like a car where you finally get a steering wheel, except it only turns the back wheels.

There is a separate track, to be fair to Google. Search Engine Land reported on an alpha test of finer PMax channel controls that adjust cost tolerance per channel, and SEJ says Google plans to run that alpha alongside the new settings for now. So the owned-channel split may be coming. It just isn't here.

Search partners finally get a test instead of a verdict

Honestly, this is the part I'm most interested in. For years, Search partners has been a checkbox you either trusted or didn't, and a lot of experienced buyers seem to have simply turned it off and never looked back.

The data has always been mixed. A Search Engine Land analysis of 20+ advertisers' brand campaigns found partner traffic converted better than Google.com on desktop and tablet, but on phones the conversion rate was 13% lower while CPC ran 185% higher. That data is old (Q4 2015), and the network has changed a lot since. Google's own line, on its Search Partner Network announcements page, is that advertisers with Search partner spend at or above 5% of ad spend "can typically experience a 11% uplift in conversions" with volume-focused Smart Bidding, in campaigns that aren't budget-limited.

That's a vendor claim about its own inventory, so I'd treat it as a hypothesis rather than a forecast. But the new cap is the first clean way to test it without betting the whole budget.

Set partners to Low, give it 5%, and you've built a controlled leak instead of an open tap.

One caveat that trips people up: easy conversion goals (page views, low-friction form fills) tend to make partner traffic look better than it is. If you test, judge it on qualified leads or revenue, not whatever primary conversion Google happens to be optimizing toward.

The February 2027 date nobody should miss

This is the line I'd flag to anyone managing Search campaigns with Display Expansion turned on. Starting February 2027, the current Display spend setup on Search campaigns goes away, and Google says spend "may shift."

Right now, Display Expansion is designed to use budget Search would otherwise leave unspent. Under the new system, Google recommends setting the Display Network to Low priority with a 50% allocation to keep your current configuration. Read that twice. A 50% ceiling is a lot of room for Display on a campaign you built for Search intent, even if in practice it rarely gets anywhere near it.

The help page adds another detail that didn't make the blog post: the Display Network won't serve at all on Search campaigns using Target Impression Share after the migration. If you run brand campaigns on Target Impression Share with Display ticked, that traffic just disappears, which is probably fine but worth knowing before your February numbers move.

Fine print that changes how you use it

A few things from the Help Center that I think most coverage will skip:

• Priority does nothing if you're not budget-limited. If a campaign isn't capped by budget, priority levels generally won't change spend distribution. Allocations still apply, though. So for most uncapped tROAS campaigns, the allocation is the only lever that matters.
• Caps are best-effort. Google says daily spend may occasionally exceed the allocation. It resets daily, and unspent or overspent amounts don't carry over.
• No manager-account control. You can't set priorities from an MCC. Agencies will be clicking through every client account individually, which (this part surprised me) seems like an odd choice for a feature pitched at scale.
• Demand Gen gets half the feature. Budget allocation isn't supported for Demand Gen, only prioritization.
• API timing is fuzzy. SEJ reports API support at launch; the Help Center says Google Ads API and Editor support is "coming soon." I'd assume you're doing this by hand at first.

A four-week partner test worth running

When the setting shows up in your account, this is roughly what I'd do, in this order.

First, pull a network segment report for the last 90 days on every Search and PMax campaign. Note partner and Display share of spend and their CPA against qualified conversions, not micro-conversions.

Second, for Search campaigns where partners are currently off, switch them on at Low priority with a 5% allocation. Leave Display off. Run it for four weeks, which is long enough for Smart Bidding to settle and short enough that a bad result doesn't cost much.

Third, for PMax campaigns where partner and Display CPA is running more than 30% above Google Search CPA, drop both to Low with a 5% to 10% allocation instead of 0%. You keep some signal without paying for the bad stuff at full rate.

My rough benchmark: keep partners in if their CPA on qualified conversions lands within 20% of Google Search CPA. Anything worse than that, cap it at 0% and move on. And for Display Expansion campaigns, don't just accept the 50% migration default. Look at what Display actually spent last quarter as a share of the campaign, and set the allocation close to that number.

Where this probably goes next

My guess is Google splits YouTube out of the "Google channels" bucket in PMax by Q4 2027, once the alpha controls mature. I'd put that at something like 60% odds. Advertisers have been asking for it for years, and building the priority framework first looks a lot like laying the plumbing for it.

I don't think any of this changes how good or bad PMax is. It changes how much you're allowed to disagree with it. For now that's mostly about partners and Display, which is a smaller win than the headline suggests, but it's also the first time in a while Google has handed a control back instead of taking one away.

By Notice Me Senpai Editorial