How to Get Sitelinks: What Google Actually Chooses

Sitelinks are not something you request, submit, or pay for. They are generated entirely by Google's ranking systems, which means the real question is not "how do I get sitelinks" but "what makes my site structure clear enough for Google to trust it with extra links." That distinction changes what you should actually do.

If you searched this because a competitor's brand search shows a tidy row of four extra links under their homepage and yours shows none, or because Google keeps surfacing an old page you wish it wouldn't, the fix lives in your site's navigation and internal linking, not in a settings panel. There also isn't a "sitelinks search box" to chase anymore: Google retired that feature, the embedded search box that used to appear under some sitelinks results, in late 2024, so any older guide telling you to add search-box markup for it is describing a feature that no longer exists.

What a Sitelink Actually Is

A sitelink is the extra link, or short set of links, that Google sometimes shows directly underneath a normal search result, almost always for a site's homepage. Instead of a single blue link and a snippet, the listing expands into a small row or grid pointing to other pages on the same site: a pricing page, a support center, a blog, a login page, whatever Google's systems judge to be a useful next click for that specific query.

There used to be a second, unrelated feature that also went by "sitelinks": the sitelinks search box, a search field embedded directly in the result, powered by WebSite structured data with a SearchAction property. Site owners added that markup hoping Google would show a mini search box under their brand result. Google discontinued the sitelinks search box across all search results in 2024. The structured data itself still validates and does nothing wrong, but it no longer produces the box, because Google switched the feature off entirely rather than deprecating it site by site. If your goal was specifically that search box, there is no longer a lever to pull for it at all.

The rest of this article is about the still-active kind: the row of extra links under a normal listing, which Google continues to generate for many navigational searches.

How Google Decides Which Pages Qualify

There is no submission form, no tag, and no field in Search Console for requesting a sitelink. Google's algorithms build them automatically, in real time, from signals it already has about your site: how your pages link to each other, how consistent your navigation is, and how clearly each page's title communicates what it is. When those signals are strong and the query looks navigational, meaning someone appears to be searching for your specific site or brand rather than a general topic, Google may decide extra links help the user get where they are going faster.

That last part matters more than most site owners expect. Sitelinks are heavily weighted toward navigational intent. A search for your exact company name is a strong candidate. A generic competitive keyword your homepage happens to rank for is not, even if you rank first, because Google has no particular reason to believe that searcher wants your site map rather than an answer. This is also why a young or lesser-known brand can do everything right structurally and still see no sitelinks: the algorithm isn't confident enough people are searching for that specific entity to justify expanding the result.

The signals that appear to matter most, based on how sitelinks visibly respond to site changes, include:

• How consistent your primary navigation is across templates and page types
• How many internal links a page receives from important pages, especially the homepage
• Whether a page's title tag clearly and distinctly describes what the page is
• Whether the query itself reads as a branded or navigational search rather than an informational one
• How established and recognizable the site or entity is overall

Why Your Site Might Have No Sitelinks at All

Seeing zero sitelinks is the normal case for most sites, not a penalty or a sign of a problem. Google reserves the feature for situations where it's confident the extra links genuinely help, and several ordinary conditions keep a site below that bar.

New or small sites without much brand-search volume are the most common case. If very few people search your company name directly, Google has little evidence that expanding your homepage result serves anyone, regardless of how well-organized your site is internally.

Navigation that Google's crawlers can't cleanly parse is the second common cause. A menu built entirely in JavaScript that doesn't render server-side, icon-only navigation with no descriptive text, or a main menu that changes structure from template to template all make it harder for Google to extract a consistent hierarchy. Google needs to see the same handful of top-level sections repeated predictably across the site to treat them as candidates.

A third, less obvious cause is a homepage that links out to too many near-identical pages. If your top navigation exposes eight category pages with similar titles and overlapping content, nothing stands out as a clearly distinct destination, and Google's systems may simply decline to pick from an undifferentiated set rather than guess.

Why You're Getting the Wrong Sitelinks

The more frustrating version of this problem isn't having none, it's having the wrong ones: an outdated promotional page, a login screen, or a blog category nobody updates anymore showing up instead of the pricing or contact page you'd actually want a new visitor to land on.

This almost always traces back to the same signals that decide whether sitelinks appear at all. From Google's point of view, the page currently showing has a stronger claim to that slot than the page you'd prefer, usually for one of the reasons listed below.

There is no way to blocklist a specific page from being chosen while leaving it live, indexed, and linked. If a page is crawlable, indexable, and reasonably well linked, it remains a candidate for as long as those conditions hold. The only way to influence the choice is to change the relative signals between the page you want and the page you don't.

• The older page has accumulated far more internal links over the years, simply because it's been around longer and other pages happened to reference it
• Its title tag is more specific and descriptive than the one on your preferred page, since sitelinks display text is derived from on-page signals like the title and headings, not a slogan you'd choose yourself
• Your preferred page sits several clicks deep in the navigation while the unwanted one lives one click from the homepage
• A redirect chain or a canonical tag points away from the page you want featured, effectively removing it from consideration

The Levers That Actually Move the Outcome

Because there's no direct request mechanism, everything you can do is indirect: you make the pages you want more clearly correct, and make the pages you don't want less prominent. None of it is instant, and none of it is guaranteed, but each of the following measurably changes the signals Google's systems are reading.

Every one of these changes probability, not certainty, and the effect compounds with the others. A site that fixes navigation consistency but keeps linking heavily to an unwanted old page will see slower, muddier movement than one that does both at once.

• Keep primary navigation consistent across the entire site, and limit it to the handful of pages you'd actually be comfortable seeing surfaced as extra links. A ten-item mega-menu gives Google ten weak candidates instead of four strong ones.
• Point internal links at the pages you want featured, from the homepage and from other high-authority pages, using clear and consistent anchor text rather than "click here" or "learn more." A page linked from your homepage nav, your footer, and several blog posts sends a much stronger signal than one linked once, from a single article.
• Write a distinct, descriptive title tag for every page you'd want considered. Vague or duplicated titles across a section make it hard for Google to tell them apart as separate useful destinations.
• Reduce internal links to pages you don't want appearing. If an old campaign page is still linked from your main nav or footer out of habit, removing those links doesn't just tidy the site, it quietly demotes that page as a sitelinks candidate.
• Remove or noindex pages you genuinely don't want in the index at all, rather than pages you simply want deprioritized. A page that should stay live for users but never be a sitelink is a linking problem; a page that shouldn't be findable at all is a noindex or removal decision, and conflating the two usually creates a bigger mess than the one you started with.
• Keep your URL structure and site hierarchy shallow and consistent for top-level sections, since a flat, predictable structure is easier for Google to summarize into a clean set of sections than a deeply nested one that varies by template.

What Doesn't Actually Work

A few ideas persist in older SEO advice that are worth ruling out directly. There is no meta tag, no schema type, and no structured data property that requests, ranks, or guarantees sitelinks; sitelinks structured data of that kind does not exist. There is no field in current Search Console for submitting or prioritizing a page as a sitelink candidate.

There used to be something closer to that: the old Webmaster Tools product, the predecessor to today's Search Console, included a demote tool that let a verified site owner flag an individual URL and ask Google not to show it as a sitelink. Google phased that control out years ago as it modernized its webmaster tooling, and no equivalent exists in the current Search Console. If you've read an older tutorial referencing a demotion feature, it's describing a product that no longer exists in that form.

Be skeptical of anything promising a guaranteed sitelinks result through a paid service, a plugin, or a one-time technical fix. Because the decision is made per query and reassessed continuously, no outside party controls it, and any claim to the contrary is worth treating as marketing rather than mechanism.

Tracking Whether Your Changes Worked

Search Console has no dedicated sitelinks report, so there is no dashboard to check after making changes. The only reliable method is direct observation: periodically search your own brand terms, ideally in a private or incognito window so cached personalization doesn't skew what you see, and note which pages appear.

Results can vary by device, location, and even the specific phrasing of the branded query, so a single check is less useful than a pattern over several searches spaced apart. If you manage more than one property, a simple log of what you observed and when is worth keeping, since sitelinks changes are often gradual enough that the shift is easy to miss without a record to compare against.

Expect the timeline to be measured in weeks, not days. Because sitelinks depend on Google recrawling your changed navigation and internal links, then reassessing structure against its existing signals, a navigation change made today typically won't show any visible effect for several crawl cycles. Judging a change a failure after two or three days is the most common mistake site owners make when working on this, and it usually just means the reassessment hasn't happened yet, not that the change had no effect.