Google this week start testing a new placement control insidePerformance Max campaigns that, for the first time, would let advertisers individually toggle the Search Partner Network and the Google Display Network on or off. The feature, labelled "Partners Alfa" inside the interface, was spotted by Adriaan Dekker on LinkedIn, who credited Renaldo Spin with finding the setting during what Dekker described as a "PMAX placement test."

The find is significant. For years the absence of granular network controls inside Performance Max has ranked among the most persistent complaints from search marketers. Reporting improvements came gradually during 2025, but the ability to switch entire networks on or off has remained out of reach - until, possibly, now.

What the alpha interface shows

The screenshot shared by Dekker, with text translated from Dutch via Google Translate, shows a new "Partners" row sitting below the standard Locations and Languages fields under "Other settings" inside a Performance Max campaign. According to the interface text, the control reads: "Choose which partners you want to run your advertisements with."

Two checkboxes appear below that prompt. The first is Search partners, described as consisting "of hundreds of non-Google websites." The second is Google Display Network, described as including "more than 2 million websites and apps." Both boxes appear checked by default in the screenshot, suggesting the current default behaviour remains unchanged - but the existence of checkboxes implies they can be unchecked.

The label "Alfa" is notable in itself. It signals a very early-stage internal or limited external test, well before a standard beta rollout. Thomas Eccel, another commenter on the LinkedIn thread, flagged the spelling, posting simply: "'alfa'?" - an observation suggesting the label may reflect a Dutch-language interface rendering of "alpha" rather than a separate product tier. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable, who covered the find on April 30, 2026, noted the feature "takes it to the next level" compared to the full channel reporting Google introduced earlier.

Why this matters for Performance Max advertisers

Performance Max campaigns currently distribute budget automatically across Search, YouTube, Display, Discover, Gmail, Maps, and search partners. Advertisers have no direct mechanism to prevent delivery on any of those surfaces - only indirect tools such as exclusion lists and brand safety settings.

The Search Partner Network has been a recurring flashpoint. Industry research from Intelligency Group, published in June 2025, found that Search Partner Network placements deliver 37 percent lower return on ad spend compared to Google Search proper. That performance gap is not hypothetical. When AI Max launched, analysis by Mike Ryan of Smarter Ecommerce documented disproportionate impression volumes accumulating on Search Partner sites compared to traffic from traditional broad match or exact match keywords. His published conclusion was direct: "turn off SPN (you should anyway!)."

The Google Display Network carries its own controversies. A January 2026 investigation documented that Google Ads purchases X inventory programmatically through Search Partners and Video Partners extensions, exposing brands to a platform many had policies to avoid. That issue affected Performance Max, Demand Gen, and Display campaigns alike, because the automated optimization in those campaigns gravitates toward cheap inventory - and X's programmatic CPMs averaged $0.39 at the time.

Against that backdrop, a simple checkbox to deselect either network would represent a meaningfully different level of control than anything currently available inside Performance Max.

The broader transparency arc

Google has been expanding Performance Max transparency incrementally since April 2025, when it announced channel-level performance reporting, full search terms reporting, and enhanced asset metrics - changes that Tal Akabas, Director of Product Management at Google Ads, accompanied with the statistic that over one million advertisers now use the campaign type. That reporting rollout actually reached accounts on May 30, 2025, a month after the announcement and following the Google Marketing Live presentation on May 21.

Network segmentation in asset reporting arrived on September 30, 2025, letting advertisers track individual asset performance across Search, Display, YouTube, Discover, Gmail, and Maps. Full placement reporting for the Search Partner Network - covering Search, Shopping, and App campaigns - followed in August 2025, with Google stating the feature "directly addresses advertiser feedback by offering full transparency on where your ads run, including impression data at the site level."

In November 2025, Google added Waze inventory for Performance Max for store goals campaigns in the United States and expanded channel performance reporting to cover search partners. January 2026 brought account-level placement exclusions - a single unified exclusion list spanning Performance Max, Demand Gen, YouTube, and Display, which a Google Ads specialist described as "the 'secret sauce' for PMax" precisely because the campaign type otherwise functions as a black box for placement decisions.

Developers gained channel-level visibility through the Google Ads API in January 2026, when API v23 introduced channel-level reporting for Performance Max, enabling programmatic breakdown of ad performance across Search, YouTube, Display, Gmail, Maps, and Discover.

What none of these updates provided was the ability to exclude an entire network at the campaign level from within the standard Google Ads interface. The alpha feature spotted today would be the first to do that.

What the "alfa" label signals about rollout timing

The "Alfa" designation places this feature at the earliest publicly visible stage of Google's product development cycle. Alpha tests in Google Ads typically involve a narrow set of accounts, often selected by Google rather than applied for by advertisers. They precede beta tests, which themselves often run for weeks or months before general availability.

The LinkedIn post from Dekker, which accumulated 54 reactions and 7 reposts as of the time of writing, attracted comments from practitioners who had not yet seen the feature in their own accounts. Mariel Betron, a Senior Marketing Manager, wrote: "Don't see it yet but good to know. Thanks." That response pattern - awareness without access - is consistent with a limited alpha distribution.

Rob Terstall, Founder of Kersvers Digital, offered a pointed structural observation in the comments: "So it will just DEvolve into Smart Shopping then?" The comment references the history of Smart Shopping campaigns, which were eventually folded into Performance Max in 2022. Smart Shopping allowed advertisers to run campaigns across Google Search, Display, YouTube, and Gmail, but did give some degree of channel selection that Performance Max initially removed. Terstall's framing raises a genuine structural question: does adding individual network toggles back into Performance Max effectively recreate a granularity that the campaign type was designed to automate away?

Search Partner Network context

The Search Partner Network consists of hundreds of non-Google websites that license Google's search technology to display ads alongside search results. These include third-party search engines, e-commerce sites, and other properties. Google has taken several steps to clean up this inventory over the past 18 months.

Parked domain ads - websites that were purchased but not developed - were permanently removed from the Search Partner Network on February 10, 2026, completing a process that began with a gradual opt-out rollout in early 2025. In April 2025, Google also introduced a Pre-Screen Solution offering curated exclusion lists through partnerships with DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Sciences, and Zefr. Smart Bidding enhancements for inventory-constrained traffic followed later that year.

Despite those improvements, a former Google employee discussing outdated advertising practices in October 2025described activating the Search Partner Network as one of three practices that have become counterproductive - noting that Smart Bidding itself identifies the quality problem by "automatically reducing budget allocation to near-zero" for these placements in many cases.

Google Display Network at over 2 million properties

The Google Display Network is the larger of the two toggles shown in the alpha interface. According to the campaign setting description visible in the screenshot, it "includes more than 2 million websites and apps." That scale, combined with the automated optimization logic in Performance Max, means the network has historically attracted both budget and scrutiny.

A comparison of Performance Max versus Demand Gen campaigns published on PPC Land noted that while Demand Gen allows advertisers to manually select specific placements on the Display Network, Performance Max uses machine learning to automatically select placements - which can produce wider reach at the cost of placement-level control. The January 2026 account-level placement exclusions partially addressed this, but required advertisers to enumerate specific sites to block rather than opting out of a network wholesale.

Industry reaction and what comes next

The LinkedIn post from Dekker and Spin generated engagement from practitioners across Europe and beyond. The reaction mix - curiosity, skepticism, and cautious optimism - reflects the complexity of the topic. Adding network-level controls could benefit advertisers with strong brand safety requirements or those who have already determined through reporting that one network underperforms for their specific goals. It could also create a fragmentation dynamic where Performance Max campaigns are so constrained that the AI optimization model loses the cross-channel signals it depends on.

Google has not made any public announcement about the feature, and the "Alfa" label suggests no timeline has been communicated. What the sighting confirms is that the concept is under active development. Given the trajectory of Performance Max transparency updates throughout 2025 and into 2026 - from channel reporting to placement exclusions to API-level network breakdowns - a formal network selection control would represent a logical next step in a sequence that has been running for approximately 14 months.

Whether this specific implementation reaches general availability, or whether it is modified or absorbed into a different control mechanism, remains to be seen.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Google, with the alpha feature discovered by Renaldo Spin and shared publicly by Adriaan Dekker on LinkedIn. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable reported on the find on April 30, 2026.

What: An alpha-stage setting inside Performance Max campaigns labelled "Partners Alfa" that presents two individual checkboxes - one for the Search Partner Network (hundreds of non-Google websites) and one for the Google Display Network (more than 2 million websites and apps) - allowing advertisers to toggle each network on or off independently.

When: The feature was spotted and shared publicly on April 30, 2026. No official Google announcement has been made, and the "Alfa" designation indicates an early-stage limited test with no confirmed rollout timeline.

Where: Visible inside the "Other settings" section of a Performance Max campaign in a Dutch-language Google Ads account. The interface text was translated from Dutch using Google Translate by Barry Schwartz. Broader availability across accounts has not been confirmed.

Why: Lack of network-level controls inside Performance Max has been a persistent concern for advertisers since the campaign type launched in 2021. Despite a sustained sequence of transparency improvements throughout 2025 and into 2026 - including channel reporting, asset-level network segmentation, and account-level placement exclusions - no mechanism existed to prevent an entire network from receiving budget at the campaign level. The alpha test suggests Google is exploring whether to add that capability, which would have direct implications for budget efficiency, brand safety, and the campaign type's automated optimization model.

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