Google sitelinks are generated automatically. There is no form to fill in, no tag to add, and no setting in Search Console that turns them on. Google’s own documentation is unambiguous about it: “At the moment, sitelinks are automated. We’re always working to improve our sitelinks algorithms, and we may incorporate site owner input in the future.”
That sentence has been on the docs page, in one form or another, for years. It is also the reason most articles about sitelinks are useless — once you accept that you cannot request them, there is nothing left to sell you, so the genre fills the gap with screenshots and wishful thinking about schema markup.
Here is the more useful framing. Sitelinks are not a feature you enable. They are Google’s summary of what your site is for, rendered as six links. If Google can look at your site and confidently name your six most important destinations, you get sitelinks. If it can’t, you don’t. Everything in this guide is a way of making that judgement easier for the algorithm to make.
This post covers the organic kind — the links that appear underneath your listing in ordinary Google search results, at no cost. If you’re here for the paid kind, the ones you write yourself inside a campaign, we’ve got a separate guide to Google Ads sitelink assets and you’ll want that one instead.
Table of Contents
What are sitelinks on Google?
Sitelinks are the additional links Google displays beneath a search result, pointing to other pages on the same site. They are shortcuts. Google describes the mechanism plainly: “Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time.”
They show up in a few distinct formats, and the distinction matters because they are not all earned the same way.
The full sitelinks grid. Up to six links in two columns, sometimes with a line of description text underneath each. This is the format people mean when they say “sitelinks,” and it appears almost exclusively on navigational searches — someone typing your brand name because they already intend to visit you. It is the strongest possible visual signal that Google considers you the definitive answer for that query, and it can push competitors’ paid ads and organic listings a long way down the page.
One-line sitelinks. A single row of two to four links, no descriptions, tucked under the listing. These turn up on non-brand queries too, and they’re much more common than the full grid. If you have never seen the six-link version on your own brand search, this is the format worth aiming at first.
Sitelinks on a sub-page. Occasionally Google will attach sitelinks to a listing that isn’t your homepage — a big category page, a documentation hub, a resource index. Same mechanism, smaller scope.
The thing all three share: you are not choosing the links, and you are not choosing the anchor text. Google is reading your site’s structure, your internal links, your navigation and your page titles, and writing the sitelinks itself.
| Format | What it looks like | Where it appears | How hard to earn |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full sitelinks grid | Up to six links in two columns, often with a line of description under each | Almost only on navigational searches — someone typing your brand name | Hardest |
| One-line sitelinks | A single row of two to four links, no descriptions | Brand and non-brand queries; far more common than the grid | Realistic first target |
| Sub-page sitelinks | Links attached to a listing that isn’t your homepage | Large category pages, documentation hubs, resource indexes | Situational |
Organic sitelinks vs Google Ads sitelinks
This is the single most common point of confusion in this topic, and it’s worth 60 seconds because the two things are almost opposites.
Organic sitelinks are earned and automatic. You cannot write them, you cannot order them, and you cannot pay for them.
Google Ads sitelink assets are written and manual. You type the link text yourself, you choose the destination, you can run four of them or twenty, and you can change them this afternoon. They also cost money when someone clicks.
| Organic sitelinks | Google Ads sitelink assets | |
|---|---|---|
| Who writes the link text | Google, from your titles and internal anchors | You, character by character |
| Can you request them | No — fully automated | Yes — you add them to the campaign |
| Cost | Free to earn, free when clicked | Free to create, charged per click |
| How fast you can change them | Weeks to months, and only indirectly | Immediately |
| How many | Up to six, Google’s choice, varies by query | As many as you build; Google picks which to show |
| Where they appear | Under an organic listing | Under a paid ad |
| What controls them | Site structure, internal links, page titles, brand demand | Your campaign settings and ad rank |
Both can appear on the same search — a paid listing at the top with your written sitelinks, an organic listing below with Google’s generated ones. That’s not a conflict, and it’s a good position to be in. If you want to think properly about how the two halves interact on a brand term, we’ve written about running organic and paid together rather than treating them as separate budgets.
The rest of this guide is about the organic kind only.
Are sitelinks free?
Yes. Organic sitelinks cost nothing — there is no fee, no ad spend, and no way to buy them. They are part of the standard organic search result.
The confusion usually comes from the paid product. Adding sitelink assets to a Google Ads campaign is also free in the sense that Google doesn’t charge you to create them, but the clicks they generate are billed like any other ad click. So: organic sitelinks are free to have and free to click; ad sitelinks are free to build and charged per click. If that’s the half you need, our guide on how to build and write them has the character limits and the copy patterns.
How Google decides which sites get sitelinks
Two conditions have to be true at once, and most articles only mention the first.
One: Google has to be able to find good shortcuts. This is the site-structure half. If your internal linking is a mess, your page titles are all variations of the same phrase, or your important pages are buried five clicks deep, the algorithm has nothing confident to pick from.
Two: Google has to think the shortcuts are useful for this specific query. This is the half people forget. From the documentation:
“We only show sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks, or we don’t think that the sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, we won’t show them.”
That second condition is why sitelinks appear on your brand name and vanish on a generic keyword, and why they can appear one week and not the next without you changing anything. Someone searching your company name has clearly already decided where they’re going, so shortcuts help. Someone searching “project management software” has not, so shortcuts don’t.
It’s also why brand search demand is effectively a prerequisite. If nobody searches your company name, Google has no navigational query to attach the grid to. Building that demand is a slower, broader piece of work — it lives in the same bucket as brand authority and PR, not in a technical checklist.
How to get Google sitelinks: the seven things that actually influence them
You cannot request sitelinks. You can make your site much easier to summarise. These seven are the ones with real evidence behind them — five come straight from Google’s own best-practice list, two from consistently watching what happens to client sites.
1. Make your brand query unambiguous
Google needs to be certain that a search for your name means you. If your company shares a name with a band, a town, or a bigger competitor, the navigational signal gets split and the grid rarely fires. Consistent naming across your site, your profiles, your listings and your press coverage is the fix, and it’s slow.
2. Give the site a shallow, logical hierarchy
Google’s guidance: “create a logical site structure that’s easy to navigate.” In practice that means your genuinely important pages should be reachable in one or two clicks from the homepage, and they should sit in an order that a human would recognise. A flat, obvious architecture gives the algorithm six clean candidates. A deep one gives it a maze. This is the same groundwork that supports everything else in your crawl and index setup.
3. Write informative, compact page titles and headings
Straight from the docs: “use informative, relevant, and compact page titles and headings.” Sitelink anchor text is frequently lifted from your title tags and H1s, so a title like “Pricing” or “Case Studies” is far more likely to become a sitelink than “Our Pricing Plans and Packages — Compare All Options | Company Name.” Short and literal wins here, which is the opposite of the instinct most people have when writing title tags for rankings.
4. Use concise, relevant internal anchor text
Google asks for internal links whose anchor text is “concise, relevant.” If every internal link to your pricing page says “click here” or “learn more,” you have given the algorithm no label to work with. Naming your links the way you’d name a menu item is most of the job. Mapping one page per intent makes this much easier, because you stop having three pages that all want the same anchor.
5. Make your main navigation say what the pages are
Your header and footer navigation is the strongest structural statement you make about which pages matter. Cute nav labels — “Our Universe,” “The Lab,” “Say Hi” — are a real and underrated reason sitelinks don’t appear. Google is trying to write a menu; hand it one.
6. Cut repetitive and near-duplicate pages
The docs list “avoid repetitive content” as a best practice, and this is where most established sites lose. Three service pages that overlap 70%, an old landing page that shadows a current one, tag archives that mirror categories — every one of them is a candidate Google now has to disambiguate, and the safest thing for it to do is show nothing. A proper content audit is the unglamorous fix, and it’s usually the one that moves this.
7. Make sure the candidate pages are actually indexed
Obvious, routinely missed. A page that is noindexed, canonicalised elsewhere, blocked in robots.txt or simply not crawled cannot become a sitelink. If you’re not sure what Google has and hasn’t picked up, it’s worth understanding how Google actually crawls a site before you start rearranging your navigation.
| Lever | What to actually do | Effort | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google’s own published best practices | |||
| Site hierarchy | Get important pages within one or two clicks of the homepage, in an order a human would recognise | High | “Create a logical site structure that’s easy to navigate” |
| Page titles & headings | Short and literal. “Pricing” beats “Our Pricing Plans and Packages — Compare All Options” | Low | “Use informative, relevant, and compact page titles and headings” |
| Internal anchor text | Name the link after the destination. Kill every “click here” and “learn more” | Medium | “Ensure internal links have concise, relevant anchor text” |
| Linking to key pages | Link your important pages from other relevant pages, not just from the nav | Medium | “Link to important pages from other relevant pages” |
| Duplicate content | Consolidate overlapping service pages, orphan landing pages and mirrored archives | High | “Avoid repetitive content” |
| Not in the docs — from watching client sites | |||
| Navigation labels | Replace cute nav names with literal ones. Google is trying to write a menu — hand it one | Low | Consistently the fastest-moving fix we see |
| Brand search demand | Build enough navigational search volume that Google has a brand query to attach the grid to | Slowest | Effectively a prerequisite for the full grid |
What does not influence sitelinks
Worth being blunt, because there is a lot of confident bad advice on this topic:
- Structured data does not generate sitelinks. Google’s sitelinks documentation does not mention structured data at all. Breadcrumb markup influences the breadcrumb trail in your listing, which is a different feature. Organization and WebSite markup are useful for other reasons. None of them produce sitelinks.
- There is no meta tag, no HTML attribute, and no Search Console setting that adds, orders or requests a sitelink.
- Submitting a sitemap does not do it either. A sitemap helps with discovery. It says nothing about relative importance.
- Site speed, HTTPS and the rest of the technical hygiene list are all worth doing. They are not sitelink levers.
Where can I find my site links?
Search your brand name in an incognito window. That’s the whole method. There is no sitelinks report, no sitelinks list to download, and no sitelinks section in Search Console — which is why searches like “google sitelinks list” and “google sitelinks download” never find what they’re looking for.
Three things worth doing when you check:
Check logged out and in a private window. Personalisation can change what you see. So can location, so if you serve multiple regions, check from each.
Check on mobile as well as desktop. The formats differ, and it’s common to have one-line sitelinks on one and nothing on the other.
Check your brand query’s position data in Search Console. Sitelinks aren’t reported directly, but a sudden CTR change on a brand query that held its position is one of the clearest signs the grid appeared or vanished. Set that query up as a saved comparison and you’ll see the shift the week it happens rather than six months later. If you’d rather not check by hand, this is a good candidate to monitor it on a schedule.
It’s also worth searching a few competitors’ brand names. Seeing which of their pages Google chose to promote tells you a lot about how the algorithm is reading a site in your category — the same logic we apply to a full look at what competitors are getting.
Why your sitelinks disappeared
This is the question that brings most people to this page, and it’s the one the rest of the internet handles worst. Sitelinks are recalculated continuously. They come and go. Most disappearances trace back to one of a handful of causes.
| What changed | Why it breaks sitelinks | What to do | Urgency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Site restructure or URL migration | Resets the structural picture Google had built; old sitelink targets now redirect or 404 | Verify redirects, resubmit the sitemap, then wait for a full recrawl | Act now |
| Navigation or template change | Header and footer links are the strongest structural vote you cast — dropping them removes the evidence | Check the live HTML actually contains the nav links, not just a JavaScript menu | Act now |
| Pages noindexed or deindexed | A page that isn’t in the index cannot be a sitelink | Run the URL Inspection tool on each page you’d expect to see | Act now |
| New near-duplicate pages | Google now has two candidates for one slot and resolves the ambiguity by showing neither | Consolidate or canonicalise; run a content audit if there are several | This month |
| Title tags rewritten | Sitelink anchor text is often lifted from titles; long or keyword-stuffed ones stop qualifying | Shorten the titles on the pages you want promoted | This month |
| Brand search demand dropped | Fewer navigational searches means a weaker signal to attach the grid to | Check brand query impressions in Search Console before blaming the site | Investigate |
| Nothing — Google reshuffled | Sitelinks are query-dependent and recalculated continuously; they come and go on their own | Wait two weeks and check again before changing anything | Wait |
Two of those deserve a note.
A site restructure is the most common cause by far. New navigation, a URL migration, a rebuilt menu, a template change that dropped the footer links — any of these resets the structural picture Google had built. Recovery is normal, but it isn’t instant.
Sometimes nothing is wrong. Sitelinks are query-dependent, and Google adjusts what it shows constantly. A grid that vanishes for a fortnight and returns unprompted is not a penalty and not a bug. Before you tear apart your navigation, wait two weeks and check again. We have watched clients rebuild a site architecture in a panic over a sitelink grid that came back on its own.
How long does recovery take?
There is no published number, and anyone quoting you one is guessing. What we see in practice: structural changes take a full recrawl plus a reassessment period, which for a mid-sized site is typically several weeks and can be a couple of months. It is slower than most SEO changes, because Google is not re-evaluating a page, it’s re-evaluating a site.
How to remove or change a sitelink
Short answer: you can’t do it directly, and the tool that used to let you is gone.
Google Search Console had a “Demote Sitelinks” setting from October 2007 until October 2016, when Google removed it, saying: “our algorithms have gotten much better at finding, creating and showing relevant sitelinks, and so we feel it’s time to simplify things.” Any article still telling you to demote a sitelink in Search Console is at least nine years out of date, and there are a lot of them.
What’s left is indirect, and Google’s current documentation is explicit about the blunt option: “If you need to remove a sitelink, consider removing the page from your site or using noindex.”
In rough order of how much collateral damage they cause:
- Change the page’s title tag and H1 so the anchor text Google would generate becomes less appealing, or less obviously a top-level destination.
- Reduce internal links to it. If it’s in the main navigation and doesn’t need to be, take it out. Internal link volume and prominence is the strongest structural vote you cast.
- Strengthen the pages you’d rather see there. Sitelinks are a ranking of your own pages against each other. Promoting a better candidate is more reliable than demoting a bad one.
- noindex the page, if it genuinely should not be in search at all.
- Remove the page, if it should not exist.
Options 1 to 3 are what you’ll usually want. Options 4 and 5 solve the sitelink and everything else about that page along with it.
What happened to the sitelinks search box
If you’ve read an older guide that told you to add Website and Search Action structured data to get a search box in your listing: that feature no longer exists.
Google announced the deprecation of the sitelinks search box on 21 October 2024 and retired it globally from 21 November 2024, with the rollout finishing the following week. The stated reason was that usage had dropped. Its removal did not affect rankings and did not affect ordinary sitelinks — those are a separate feature and are still very much alive.
You can leave the markup in place; it’s inert rather than harmful. But it does nothing, and it should not be on anyone’s sitelinks checklist in 2026.
The honest summary
Sitelinks are a byproduct, not a project. Every genuine lever — clear architecture, literal page titles, sensible internal anchor text, honest navigation, no duplicate pages, strong brand search demand — is something you should be doing anyway, for reasons that have nothing to do with sitelinks. There is no shortcut, because the whole feature is Google’s assessment of whether your site has shortcuts.
The practical takeaway is a reordering, not a new task list. If you want sitelinks, stop looking for the setting and go and fix the navigation.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Can I pay Google for sitelinks?
No. Organic sitelinks cannot be purchased at any price. You can buy the paid equivalent by running a Google Ads campaign with sitelink assets, but those are a different feature that appears on ads, not on organic listings.
How many sitelinks can Google show?
Up to six in the full two-column grid, usually on brand searches. One-line sitelinks typically show two to four. Google chooses the number, and it varies by query and device.
Do sitelinks help SEO?
They don’t change your ranking — they’re a display feature applied to a result you already earned. What they do change is click-through rate and how much of the page your listing occupies, which pushes competitors down. On a brand query, a sitelinks grid can dominate the visible screen.
Why does my competitor have sitelinks and I don’t?
Usually one of two things: their brand search volume is higher, so Google has a stronger navigational signal to attach the grid to, or their site structure is easier to summarise. Search both brands side by side and compare the site architectures rather than the content.
Can I choose which pages appear as sitelinks?
Not directly. You influence the selection through internal linking, navigation prominence and page titles. Google makes the final choice, per query.
How long does it take to get sitelinks on a new site?
There’s no fixed timeline. A new site generally needs to be fully indexed and to have enough brand search demand for Google to see the navigational intent, which realistically means months rather than weeks.
Do sitelinks appear on mobile?
Yes, though the formats differ from desktop and the full six-link grid is less common. Always check both.
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