Adwords "ghost clicks"

I'm new to Adwords and I can't seem to find anything specific to this issue, so I was hoping somebody here could help. I just started three adwords campaigns for one of my local businesses, I noticed that on two of them, my clicks shot to 40+ in a matter of an hour today. When I check my campaign, it says they all came from "partner sites". What are these partner sites and is this something you should disable? Can you disable it? It just didn't sit right with me. Thoughts?

Partner sites are sites that are monetizing by showing Adwords ads. In other words, publishers using Adsense. Google calls them "search partners" but to me, that's technically incorrect. They don't all have searches, in fact most don't. Ads are shown based on your keywords and what the page is about and that is not always a good match.

I have not used search partners in many years and recommend to disable that setting. It is a campaign-level setting and is on by default.