Sitelinks are the extra links that appear indented under your main result — the "Pricing," "About," "Blog" shortcuts that turn a single listing into a mini directory of your site. You cannot add them manually or buy them; search engines generate them algorithmically when they are confident about your site's structure. What you can do is make your site so clear and well-organised that generating them becomes the obvious choice. This guide explains how sitelinks are chosen, what influences them, and how to demote a link you don't want showing up.
What sitelinks are and why they matter
When someone searches for your brand, a strong result can expand into several sub-links pointing to your most important pages. This does three things: it takes up more vertical space and pushes competitors down, it lets users jump straight to what they want, and it signals authority — sites that get sitelinks look established. For AI and assistants, the same underlying clarity that earns sitelinks also helps them understand your site's hierarchy and pick the right page to cite.
Crucially, sitelinks are algorithmic. There is no markup that forces them and no submission form. Google decides whether to show them, how many, and which pages, based on its understanding of your site. Your job is to feed that understanding.
How search engines choose sitelinks
Engines infer sitelinks from a handful of signals working together. Internal linking is the biggest one: pages you link to prominently and consistently — from your main navigation, from the footer, from within your content — read as important. This is why a deliberate internal linking strategy is the foundation of good sitelinks; the pages you treat as important in your own link graph are the candidates engines consider.
Site architecture matters too. A clear, shallow hierarchy — where key sections are a click or two from the homepage — makes it obvious which pages are top-level. Clean, descriptive URLs and page titles help engines label each sitelink correctly. Traffic and click patterns feed in as well: pages users actually visit after searching your brand are more likely to be surfaced. And a BreadcrumbList schema reinforces your hierarchy, giving engines an explicit map of how sections nest.
Practical steps to encourage sitelinks
You cannot summon sitelinks on demand, but you can stack the odds. Concretely:
- Keep a clear main navigation. Your most important sections should live in a consistent, crawlable nav — not hidden behind JavaScript menus that bots can't follow.
- Use descriptive, unique page titles. Sitelink labels are drawn largely from titles, so "Pricing — Acme" beats "Home | Welcome."
- Strengthen internal links to key pages. Link to your handful of most important destinations often and with consistent anchor text.
- Keep your hierarchy shallow. Bury a page five clicks deep and it won't read as top-level.
- Add WebSite and Organization schema. A clean brand entity, as covered in our guide to WebSite schema and the sitelinks search box, helps engines recognise your site as a coherent whole.
- Be patient. Sitelinks appear once engines trust your structure; new sites rarely get them immediately.
What to do when a wrong page shows up
Sometimes an engine picks a sitelink you'd rather not feature — an old landing page, a login screen, a thin utility page. You cannot pick replacements directly, but you can discourage the unwanted one. Reduce how prominently you link to it internally; a page you barely link to is a weaker candidate. If it genuinely shouldn't be indexed at all — a login or internal search page — apply noindex so it drops out of results entirely and can't be chosen. Older Search Console versions once offered a sitelink-demotion tool; that has been retired, so today the levers are your internal link prominence and indexing controls, not a button.
Avoid overcorrecting. Blocking a page in robots.txt to hide it from sitelinks is the wrong move, because a disallowed page can still be indexed as a bare URL and you lose the ability to serve a noindex signal. Control candidacy through link prominence and indexing directives, not by cutting off crawling.
Sitelinks are earned, not requested. They flow from the same fundamentals that help every part of your visibility: a clean hierarchy, a deliberate internal link graph, descriptive titles, and clear structured data that tells engines what your site is and how it's organised. Get those right and sitelinks tend to follow. To see how clearly crawlers and AI can read your site's structure — and where your hierarchy or internal linking is muddy — run the CheckMy.site scanner and act on what it reports.