What Is Sitelinks? How Google Builds Those Extra Links

Aug 11, 2026 · SEO Glossary

Search your own brand name in Google and look at the first result. If your site has been around a while, you'll probably see six or so smaller links stacked underneath it: Pricing, About, Contact, Blog, Login. Those are sitelinks. There's no dashboard where you set them up, no meta tag that requests them, and no line item on any invoice. Google generates them algorithmically, which is exactly why so many people ask what is sitelinks and how do I get them.

What Are Sitelinks and When Do They Appear?

Sitelinks are additional links Google attaches to a search result, pointing to other pages on the same site. They come in a few flavors:

• Full sitelinks — the big two-column block of up to six links under a top result, usually triggered by branded or navigational queries. This block can push competitors below the fold, so it's worth having.
• Inline sitelinks — a single row of small text links inside an ordinary result.
• Sitelinks search box — a search field inside the result itself, letting users search your site directly from the SERP.

The full block appears almost exclusively when Google is confident the searcher wants your site specifically. Search "stripe" and Stripe gets sitelinks. Search "payment processing" and nobody does, because the query is ambiguous.

You Can't Request Them — and You Can't Demote Them Anymore

Google Search Console used to have a sitelinks demotion tool where you could tell Google "stop showing this page as a sitelink." That tool was retired back in 2016. Since then the whole system is fully automated: Google decides whether to show sitelinks, which pages to pick, and what anchor text to display.

That last part surprises developers. The visible label on a sitelink is often pulled from your page's <title> element, but Google will happily shorten it or substitute anchor text from your internal navigation. If your title is <title>Pricing Plans for Teams of Every Size | AcmeApp</title>, the sitelink will probably just say "Pricing". Google is compressing your information architecture into a menu, and it uses every signal it can find to do it.

The Signals Google Reads From Your Markup

Because sitelinks are inferred rather than declared, the only lever you have is making your site's structure unambiguous. In practice these things matter:

1. Consistent internal navigation. If "Pricing" is linked from your header on every page with the same anchor text and the same URL, Google learns that page is a top-level destination. If half your links say "Plans" and point to /plans while the other half say "Pricing" and point to /pricing/, you've split the signal.
2. Descriptive, distinct title elements. Six pages titled "Home | AcmeApp" give Google nothing to build labels from. Pair titles with a clean heading hierarchy so each page's purpose is machine-readable.
3. Crawlable links. Navigation rendered only after a JavaScript event, or buttons with onclick handlers instead of real <a href> elements, may not count as links at all. Check the raw HTML response, not just what you see in the browser.
4. A flat, logical URL structure. Pages buried five clicks deep almost never become sitelinks.

The Search Box Is the One Piece You Can Mark Up

While the link block itself can't be requested, the sitelinks search box can be wired to your own site search using structured data. The JSON-LD looks like this:

{"@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "WebSite", "url": "https://example.com/", "potentialAction": {"@type": "SearchAction", "target": "https://example.com/search?q={search_term_string}", "query-input": "required name=search_term_string"}}

Two caveats. First, this markup doesn't make the search box appear — Google decides that on its own, and usually only for large, frequently-searched brands. Second, if the box does appear and you haven't added the markup, Google routes queries through its own results scoped to your domain instead of your internal search. If you want to understand the markup mechanics more broadly, see our guide to schema markup.

Debugging: Why Your Site Doesn't Have Sitelinks Yet

Common causes, roughly in the order I see them during audits:

• The brand query isn't clearly navigational. If your company is named after a dictionary word ("Anchor", "Notion"-style names before they got big), Google can't be sure searchers want you.
• Too few indexed pages, or too little traffic. A five-page site rarely earns the full block. Give it time and links.
• Key pages return errors or redirect. Google won't feature a sitelink that bounces through a redirect chain or intermittently 404s. Running your site through a crawler such as WebsiteChecker.Tech surfaces exactly these problems — broken internal links, redirect chains, and duplicate titles are the three findings most correlated with weak sitelinks in my experience.
• Titles are duplicated across sections. Google skips candidates it can't label distinctly.

What Sitelinks Are Actually Worth

For branded queries, the full sitelinks block roughly doubles the vertical space your result occupies. Click-through data from sites I've worked on shows branded CTR climbing from the low 60s to 75–80% once sitelinks appear, mostly because the block crowds out aggregator and review sites that were skimming clicks. Deep links also route users straight to pricing or docs, cutting a navigation step. You can't buy that placement; you can only build a site coherent enough that Google assembles it for you.