Google sitelinks SEO has attracted more folklore than almost any other SERP feature. You will find advice to add special markup, to submit preferred pages, or to wait for a traffic threshold. None of it comes from Google. What Google does say is short, and it points at ordinary site hygiene rather than tricks.
That is good news if your site is well organised and bad news if it is not. Sitelinks are a side effect of Google understanding your site. You cannot shortcut that understanding, but you can stop getting in its way.
What Google sitelinks are, and when they appear
Google’s Search Central documentation on sitelinks defines them plainly: “Sitelinks are links from the same domain that are clustered together under a text result.” A typical Google sitelinks example is a branded search where the main result for example.com carries links to its pricing, contact, login and main product pages beneath it.
The same page states the key constraint: “At the moment, sitelinks are automated.” Google shows them only “when we think they’ll be useful to the user.” That second phrase explains why they appear mostly on navigational and branded searches. When someone types your brand name, a set of likely destinations is useful. When someone types a broad informational query, it usually is not.
So the first test of whether sitelinks are a realistic goal is search intent. If the query people use to reach you is not about you, Google has little reason to show a menu of your pages under the result.
Google sitelinks best practices, from the source
Google lists a small set of best practices. None of them is specific to sitelinks; all of them describe a site that is easy to understand. The table pairs each one with what it looks like in practice.
| Google’s recommendation | What it looks like on a site | Further reading |
|---|---|---|
| Informative, relevant, compact page titles and headings | Each key page has a short title that names what it is | Title length guide |
| Logical site structure | Sections that a visitor could sketch from the menu | Click depth guide |
| Link important pages from relevant places | Key pages reached from navigation and from related content | Internal linking guide |
| Concise, descriptive internal anchor text | Links that say where they go, not “here” | Anchor text guide |
| Avoid repetition | No near-duplicate titles or anchors across sections | Title length guide |
Titles and headings
Sitelinks are labelled, and the label has to come from somewhere. Short, specific titles and headings give Google something clean to use. A page titled “Pricing” is easy to label; a page titled “Everything you need to know about our flexible plans for growing teams in 2026” is not. Our guide to SEO title length covers how to keep titles tight without losing meaning.
Internal links and anchor text
Google’s advice to link important pages from relevant places, with concise and descriptive anchor text, is the part most sites neglect. If your contact page is only linked from a footer with the anchor “Get in touch”, and your pricing page is linked with five different phrasings, you are sending mixed signals about both. See our guides to internal linking for SEO and anchor text for the wider method.
Avoiding repetition
Google’s last recommendation is to avoid repetition, and it is easy to break without noticing. Templated titles that open with the same brand phrase, category pages whose headings differ by a single word, and menus that link the same page under two labels all make it harder to tell your key pages apart. If two pages look interchangeable to you, they will look interchangeable to Google, and neither makes a convincing sitelink.
Site structure is the lever you actually hold
The recommendation that matters most is the vaguest: a logical site structure. In practice, that means your important pages sit close to the homepage, your navigation groups them in a way a visitor would recognise, and nothing important is buried four or five clicks deep. Our analysis of click depth explains why distance from the homepage matters for how pages are found and weighted.
A useful exercise is to write down the five or six pages you would want as sitelinks, then check three things for each. Is it linked from the main navigation? Does its title name it in a few words? Is it linked from related content with consistent anchor text? Wherever the answer is no, that is your fix list. It will not force sitelinks, but it is the same work that makes the site easier to use, so it is not wasted if they never appear.
How to remove a sitelink you don’t want
There is no way to request sitelinks, and there is no setting to choose them. The only direct control is removal. If a page you do not want is showing as a sitelink, Google’s guidance is to delete the page or noindex it. A page that is not in the index cannot appear beneath your result.
The noindex route uses a robots meta tag in the page head, such as <meta name="robots" content="noindex">. Be sure that is what you want: it removes the page from search entirely, not just from the sitelinks. Our guide to the meta robots tag covers the side effects. If the page is useful and simply showing up in the wrong place, the better fix is usually upstream: give it a clearer title, link to it less prominently, and strengthen the pages you would rather see.
The sitelinks advice to ignore
Plenty of guides promise more than Google does. Anything that claims a markup type, submission process or tool setting will produce sitelinks is describing something Google has not documented. The documentation says they are automated and appear when useful. That is the whole of the official position.
The other common error is treating sitelinks as a reward for authority or traffic. They are better understood as a reward for clarity. A small site with clean navigation and a branded query can get them; a large site with tangled structure may not.
One limitation to state plainly. Google says sitelinks are automated and gives best practices, but it does not publish how it chooses which pages to show, how many, or what threshold triggers them. Everything here improves the odds without guaranteeing an outcome, and you cannot test a change against Google’s selection directly. Google also says “at the moment”, which leaves room for the behaviour to change.
Frequently asked questions
Can I ask Google to show sitelinks for my site?
No. Google says sitelinks are automated and there is no way to request them. You can only improve titles, structure and internal links.
How do I remove a sitelink?
Delete the page or add a noindex robots meta tag to it. That removes it from search entirely, not only from sitelinks.
Does structured data create sitelinks?
Google’s sitelinks guidance does not list any markup that produces them. Its best practices cover titles, headings, structure, internal links and anchor text.
Why do sitelinks show for my brand name but not other queries?
Google shows them when it thinks they’ll be useful to the user. A menu of your pages is useful on a search for you, and rarely on a broad informational query.
The takeaway Sitelinks are automated and cannot be requested. Short titles, a logical structure and consistent internal links make them more likely; noindexing or deleting a page is the only way to remove one.
