Search your own company name on Google and the homepage rarely shows up alone. Underneath the main blue link sits a small cluster of others: pricing, login, about, contact. A marketing lead at a project-management startup saw hers point to a three-year-old careers page instead of the product tour, and spent an afternoon digging through Search Console for the setting to swap it. She never found one. The setting no longer exists. Those grouped links are sitelinks, and how they surface, what shapes them, and what a site owner can and cannot change about them is one of the more misread corners of a branded result.
What sitelinks are, and what they are not #
Sitelinks are the extra links Google places beneath a single search result, each pointing to another page on the same site. They turn one listing into a small map. Search a brand name like Notion or Dropbox and the first result expands into a block of internal destinations under the homepage, which is Google guessing where most people who typed that name wanted to go. Google shows anywhere from a single row of links to a fuller block, and reserves the larger version for results it reads as a trip to a specific site rather than a general question. That is why the links cluster on brand and navigational searches and stay rare on broad informational ones.
Two things get confused with sitelinks. The site name and favicon are the label and icon above the result, a separate topic with its own guide. The sitelinks search box was a search field that once sat inside some brand results, and it is a different feature that no longer runs. The grouped links themselves are what this guide is about. The distinction matters.
Where they come from: Google reads the shape of your site #
Google generates sitelinks automatically. In its own documentation the company states that its systems analyze the link structure of a site to find shortcuts that save users time, and that it shows these links only when it judges them useful. There is no markup. No schema type, no meta tag, and no Search Console field will produce one of these links or name which page becomes one.
Google is direct about the ceiling on control. Its guidance reads: “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.” A documentation site whose “Getting started” page is linked from every other page, with a clear title and a short descriptive anchor, hands the algorithm an obvious shortcut to promote. A site that buries the same page four clicks deep and links to it as “click here” hands it almost nothing.
What you can influence #
The levers are indirect. You cannot pick sitelinks, but you can make the right pages easy for Google to read as shortcuts, and the company lists four practices that feed that reading. Picture an online store whose “Size guide” beats its “Returns” page into the block because a dozen product pages link to the size guide by name while returns is reachable only from the footer. Nothing was set. The link pattern decided it. The mechanics of each practice, how to build internal links, structure headings, and write titles, live in their own guides on this site, so the focus here is how they feed sitelink selection rather than how to carry them out.
| What Google recommends | How it feeds sitelink selection |
|---|---|
| Informative, relevant, compact page titles and headings | Sitelink text can be pulled from your titles, so a clear title gives Google clean words to display |
| A logical site structure, with important pages linked from other relevant pages | Pages that many internal links point to read as important, which makes them shortcut candidates |
| Concise anchor text that matches the destination page | Descriptive anchors tell Google what a linked page covers, which helps it label a sitelink |
| Content without repetition | Near-duplicate pages compete with each other, so none stands out as the shortcut |
None of this forces a result. It raises the odds that the pages you care about are the ones Google finds worth surfacing, and it leaves the algorithm’s final call untouched.
What you can no longer control: the demotion tool #
For nine years there was a partial control. The old Search Console, then called Webmaster Tools, let a site owner demote a specific sitelink URL, which pushed an unwanted page down the list of candidates. Google removed that feature on October 13, 2016, and explained the reason plainly: its algorithms had become good enough at finding and showing relevant sitelinks that the manual demotion was no longer needed.
The practical result is worth stating flatly. You cannot hand-pick a sitelink. You cannot hide one you dislike, reorder the set, or force a favorite page into the block. An agency still working from a 2015 playbook that promises to “manage your sitelinks in Webmaster Tools” is describing a button that has been gone for years. The only removal path Google offers now is indirect: if a page truly does not belong in search, the documented options are to remove it from the site or add a noindex rule, which takes it out of results entirely rather than out of the block alone.
The sitelinks search box is a different, discontinued feature #
This one causes real confusion, so it earns its own section. The sitelinks search box was a search field Google sometimes showed inside a brand’s result, letting a person search within that site straight from the results page. It ran on WebSite structured data with a SearchAction, which made it one of the few sitelink-adjacent elements a site could mark up. They are not the same.
Google announced on October 21, 2024 that it was deprecating the sitelinks search box, and retired it globally on November 21, 2024, citing dropped usage over the years. After that date it removed the related report from Search Console and the markup highlight from the Rich Results Test. Google confirmed that leaving the old WebSite and SearchAction markup in place causes no errors and does not affect a site, and that the change does not touch regular sitelinks, the grouped links beneath a result. So the searchbox markup sitting in your schema is now inert, and clearing it out is housekeeping rather than a fix for anything.
When a sitelink is wrong, missing, or you want a different page #
Because the direct controls are gone, the honest response to a sitelink problem is to change what Google reads, not to reach for a setting. The table below maps the common situations to what is real and what helps.
| Situation | The reality | What helps |
|---|---|---|
| No sitelinks appear at all | Frequent for newer sites, thin authority, or a flat or unclear structure | A clearer navigation, strong internal links to the key pages, and letting Google crawl and index them |
| The wrong page shows as a sitelink | No demotion tool exists to remove that single link | Strengthen a better candidate page’s title and internal links, or noindex the wrong page if it does not belong in search at all |
| You want a specific order or set | Ordering and selection are the algorithm’s call | No action controls this; the set changes as Google re-reads the site |
One pattern sits underneath. Sitelinks are an output of how legible your site is to Google, not an input you set in a panel. A brand whose most important pages are clearly titled, well linked, and free of near-duplicates hands the algorithm an obvious set of shortcuts to choose from. The realistic goal is that legibility, and then leaving the rest to the system that draws the links.