The all or nothing switch
For years the only control over where a Search budget went was a switch. You either left Search partners and the Google Display Network turned on and accepted whatever share of the daily budget they took, or you turned them off and gave up on them completely.
Neither option matched how an owner actually thinks. Nobody running a roofing or renovations company believes that a click on Google Search and an impression on a display placement deserve the same money. They just never had a field where they could say so.
Priority first, ceiling second
On October 14, 2026 Google announced two controls for Google Ads that work together. Channel prioritization lets you label inventory as high priority or low priority, by channel or by channel grouping, and Google says campaigns will fully fund the high priority channels, within their target when you use Target CPA or Target ROAS, before allocating the remaining budget to the lower priority ones.
The second lever is the one almost nobody will notice. When a channel is set to low priority, you can also specify a maximum percentage of the daily budget to spend there, and Google says its tools aim to keep spend within that limit on a best effort basis. That ceiling is what makes the order real on a campaign using Target CPA or Target ROAS that is not limited by budget, where Google says priority on its own generally will not have an impact.
A date on the calendar
The controls apply to Search, Shopping, Performance Max and Demand Gen, and they can be configured at the account level, the campaign level or the shared budget level. On Search campaigns you can give Google Search, Search partners and the Google Display Network three different priority levels. In Performance Max and Demand Gen, the Google surfaces Search, YouTube, Maps, Gmail and Discover are grouped together as Google channels.
There is also a deadline. Starting February 2027, Search campaigns with the Google Display Network enabled have to be reconfigured, or the existing settings will change on their own. To keep the current configuration, Google says to set the Google Display Network to low priority with a 50% budget allocation.
What changes in the week
Whoever owns the account does this once, and it is a short job. Open the account level settings, decide which placement you want funded first, mark the rest as low priority and give each one a percentage you can live with. Google says the features roll out over the next months, so the task for this month is knowing which of your campaigns still have the Display Network on.
What you notice in the week is quieter than it sounds. The weekly report starts matching the plan you had in your head, because the money went where you pointed it. And testing a network stops being a gamble: it becomes a line with a ceiling you set yourself, one you can raise when it earns it.