What are Sitelinks?

Google's systems analyze a site's link structure to find shortcuts that will save searchers time, then cluster those links beneath the site's main result, according to Google Search Central's sitelinks documentation. You can't request or buy them. Google adds sitelinks on its own, mostly for searches on a brand or site name, and only when it decides they'll help with that specific query.

Sitelinks are one of several SERP features, alongside featured snippets and rich snippets. Each changes how a result looks on the page, and none of them can be bought.

What sitelinks look like

Google's documentation illustrates the format with a mock pet-supply site: the homepage is the main result, and beneath it sitelinks point to the dog supplies, cat food, and aquarium pages. To see a live example, search a well-known brand name. The top result is usually the brand's homepage, with sitelinks under it leading to pages like login, contact, or pricing, each as its own title link.

The full block of expanded sitelinks appears only under the top organic result and shows between 1 and 6 links, each with a short description, per Semrush's sitelinks guide (updated January 14, 2025). Smaller one-line sitelinks, a single row of links with no description text, can also appear under results further down the page.

Why sitelinks matter

Sitelinks do two jobs. They let searchers jump straight to the page they actually wanted, skipping your homepage navigation entirely. They also make your listing physically bigger: on a branded search, a top result with a full sitelinks block takes up much more of the screen, which pulls more of that query's clicks to your site and pushes competitors further down the page.

Search your own brand name to see what Google currently shows for your site, then use Google Search Console to monitor clicks and impressions on your branded queries.

How to encourage sitelinks

You can't fill in a form to get sitelinks. Google's published best practices are structural:

• Keep page titles and headings informative, relevant, and compact.
• Build a logical site structure that's easy to navigate.
• Link to your important pages from other relevant pages, using concise, descriptive anchor text for your internal links.
• Avoid repetitive content.

Older advice often recommends schema markup or an XML sitemap to win sitelinks. Neither appears in Google's current guidance: a sitemap helps Google crawl your pages, but the shortcut-finding runs on your internal links. And if your site's structure doesn't let Google's algorithms find good sitelinks, it won't show any at all.

Organic sitelinks vs. Google Ads sitelink assets

Two features share the name, and the difference matters when someone offers to set up your sitelinks:

• Organic sitelinks are chosen automatically by Google, cost nothing, and can't be edited directly. Your influence is indirect, through site structure and internal links.
• Sitelink assets in Google Ads are links an advertiser writes and attaches to paid ads, choosing the link text and landing pages inside the Google Ads account.

Only the paid kind can be configured by hand. If a tool or service promises exact control over your organic sitelinks, it's promising something Google doesn't offer.