What Are Sitelinks? How Google Picks Them and What You Can Influence

Sitelinks are extra links to other pages on the same website that Google shows under one search result. You see them most when you search for a brand name, such as netflix or youtube. Google picks them automatically, so you cannot choose them yourself, but you can make good ones more likely.

What are sitelinks?

Google’s own documentation defines sitelinks as links from the same domain that are grouped together under a text result. Its systems study the links on your site to find shortcuts that save searchers time.

In plain words, Google is guessing where you want to go next on that site and giving you a direct link. Sitelinks are one of many SERP features, the extra elements that sit around the normal blue links on a search results page.

Two real examples

We fetched the US desktop results for 30 everyday searches on October 9, 2026. Here is what showed under the top result for two brand searches:

Notice what Google chose. These are the pages people most likely want next, like signing in or picking a plan. Two of the Netflix links point to help.netflix.com, so sitelinks can lead to a subdomain of the same site. And three of the five Netflix links are about signing in, which shows that Google’s picks are not always tidy.

The kinds of sitelinks you will see

Full sitelinks

This is the block of links under a single result, usually the top one. It tends to show up when one website is clearly what the searcher wants, such as a search for a brand name.

It is also rarer than many people think. Of our 30 results pages, only 2 had a full block of sitelinks, and both were brand searches. In the same sample, the results for amazon, gmail and facebook login showed none.

Jump links to parts of a page

Sometimes a result shows two or three short links that jump to sections of that same page. On October 9, 2026, the Investopedia result for click through rate formula had three of them: “What Is the Click-Through Rate?”, “How to Calculate the CTR” and “Insights From CTR”. Those labels match headings on the page.

In our 30 page sample, jump links appeared under 7 results, on searches like best credit card, mortgage and best running shoes. These are the closest thing most normal pages get to sitelinks, and clear headings are what feed them.

Ad sitelinks

Google Ads has its own sitelinks, which are paid and written by the advertiser. Google says an ad can show up to 6 of them on desktop and up to 8 on mobile. The text of each one is limited to 25 characters in most languages. Unlike organic sitelinks, you choose these yourself.

The sitelinks search box (retired)

Some brand results used to show a small search box that searched inside that site. Google said its use had dropped over time and removed it starting November 21, 2024. Google also said the change did not affect rankings or normal sitelinks. You can leave the old markup on your site, because it causes no errors.

Do sitelinks help SEO?

Sitelinks are not a way to rank higher. Full sitelinks usually show up once your site is already the top answer for a search, and they change how that result looks.

What they do change is space. A result with five sitelinks takes up far more of the page than a single blue link, and it pushes the next site further down. Space is one reason the same position can earn very different click rates, as our guide to organic CTR shows.

How Google chooses sitelinks

Google’s documentation says a few clear things:

• Sitelinks are automated. No person at Google picks them, and there is no setting to request them.
• They only show when Google thinks they are useful. If they would not help with a given search, they do not appear.
• Site structure matters. If Google cannot find good shortcuts in the way your site links together, it shows none.

That last point is the one you control. Google works out your important pages from how your site links to them. A page that is linked from your menu and from many related pages sends a stronger signal than a page that nothing links to.

What you can influence

You cannot pick sitelinks, but Google’s sitelinks page lists the things that help. Here they are as a checklist:

1. Write clear titles and headings. Google asks for page titles and headings that are informative, relevant and short. “Pricing” beats “Our flexible plans for every team”.
2. Build a logical structure. Make important pages easy to reach from your home page and menu, and link to them from other related pages. To spot pages that nothing links to, first list all the pages on your site.
3. Use short, relevant link text. The words in your internal links should describe the page they point to. “Read more” tells Google nothing.
4. Avoid repeating yourself. Pages that say the same thing make it harder for Google to tell them apart.
5. Make sure the pages are in Google at all. A page that is not indexed can never be a sitelink. If key pages are missing, work through why a website does not show up on Google.

Brand strength matters too. In our sample, full sitelinks only showed on brand searches, so a brand that people look up by name has the best chance of getting them.

Why you cannot just pick them

Google says sitelinks are automated “at the moment” and that it may take input from site owners in the future. Today there is no tool in Search Console for adding or ordering them.

That leaves one blunt way to remove a sitelink you do not want. Google suggests removing the page or adding a noindex tag. Noindex takes the page out of Google’s results completely, so only use it on pages that should not be in search at all.

How to check your own sitelinks

Search your brand name in a private window, signed out, with the location set to the country you care about. Your own browser is personalized, so this gives a fairer view. Our guide to checking Google rankings explains how to set the location.

Check on both desktop and mobile, since the layout differs. If you track many brands or countries, some SERP APIs return sitelinks as a list of links attached to the organic result. That lets you record which pages Google picks over time and spot changes after you restructure your site.