Article No. 53

Sitelinks and Site Navigation: What Schema Can (and Can’t) Do

Abstract

There's no schema type that requests sitelinks, and no markup that guarantees them. That correction matters more than anything else in this guide, because it contradicts what a lot of...

Editorial Staff Published Read 5 min read

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There’s no schema type that requests sitelinks, and no markup that guarantees them. That correction matters more than anything else in this guide, because it contradicts what a lot of schema content, including earlier versions of this page, has implied. Here’s what’s actually true, and what’s actually worth implementing.

Two separate things get conflated under “sitelinks schema,” and separating them is the point of this guide. The first is regular sitelinks, the indented sub-links Google sometimes shows under a search result, which are 100% algorithmic. The second is a now-dead feature called the Sitelinks Search Box, which briefly did have an associated schema type. Treating those as the same thing, or as both currently reachable through markup, is where most confusion on this topic comes from.

The indented sub-links that sometimes appear under a search result, taking a visitor directly to a site’s key pages, are generated entirely by Google’s algorithm based on site structure, internal linking, and established authority. There is no schema.org type that requests them and no property that guarantees them.

Google confirmed this directly when it removed the sitelinks demotion tool from Search Console in October 2016, telling site owners that “our algorithms have gotten much better at finding, creating and showing relevant sitelinks” and pointing them instead toward clear site structure, informative internal anchor text, and letting Google crawl and index the important pages, none of which is a schema task (Search Engine Land coverage of the 2016 removal). If you’ve read anywhere that a specific schema type produces sitelinks, that’s incorrect regardless of which type is named.

There used to be one schema-adjacent feature in this space: the Sitelinks Search Box, implemented with WebSite and SearchAction markup, which could add a search box directly into a site’s search result allowing users to search the site from the results page. Google deprecated it on October 21, 2024, and retired it globally on November 21, 2024, citing declining usage (Farewell, Sitelinks Search Box).

If your site still has the old WebSite/SearchAction markup in place, Google has confirmed leaving it won’t cause errors or hurt anything else on the page, it simply no longer does anything visible. Don’t spend time removing it if it’s already there, but don’t implement it new on any site, and don’t follow any guide (including any older version of this one) that recommends adding it as a way to earn a search box in results. That feature no longer exists in Google Search, for anyone.

Since there’s no dedicated schema type for this, what actually correlates with getting sitelinks is structural and qualitative rather than a specific markup implementation:

  • A clear site hierarchy. Pages organized so Google can identify a small set of genuinely important, distinct sections rather than a flat pile of similarly-weighted URLs.
  • Internal linking with descriptive anchor text. Google’s own 2016 guidance specifically calls out “informative, compact” anchor text that avoids repetition as a factor in how well it can identify relevant sitelinks.
  • Crawlability and indexation of the pages you’d want featured. A page Google can’t or won’t index can’t become a sitelink no matter how it’s linked internally.
  • Established site authority. Sitelinks tend to appear for well-known brand-name and navigational queries where Google has high confidence about the site’s structure and importance, not for arbitrary keyword searches.

None of this is controllable with a percentage-weighted formula, and Google has never published one. Any content presenting sitelinks eligibility as a scored model with specific percentage weights per factor is inventing precision Google doesn’t provide.

BreadcrumbList is a genuinely current, Google-supported schema type, and it’s the one piece of markup in this space actually worth implementing. It describes a page’s position in your site hierarchy (Home > Category > Subcategory > Page), and Google can display it directly in the search result to help users understand where a page sits before they click (BreadcrumbList structured data).

A minimal example:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "BreadcrumbList",
  "itemListElement": [
    {
      "@type": "ListItem",
      "position": 1,
      "name": "Home",
      "item": "https://example.com/"
    },
    {
      "@type": "ListItem",
      "position": 2,
      "name": "Schema Markup",
      "item": "https://example.com/schema/"
    },
    {
      "@type": "ListItem",
      "position": 3,
      "name": "Sitelinks and Navigation Schema"
    }
  ]
}

Google requires at least two ListItem entries, each with a position and name; the final item’s item URL is optional since it’s the current page. Google’s guidance is to represent a typical user path to the page rather than mirroring the literal URL folder structure, so a deeply nested URL doesn’t need a matching deeply nested breadcrumb trail if that’s not how a real visitor would navigate there. If a page is genuinely reachable through more than one meaningful path (for example, a product reachable from both a category page and a brand page), Google’s documentation allows specifying multiple breadcrumb trails for that page rather than forcing a single artificial hierarchy. Checking that the markup validates correctly is covered in the structured data troubleshooting and validation guide, not repeated here.

Since sitelinks aren’t a markup target, the practical work is structural:

  1. Keep primary navigation to a manageable, clearly labeled set of top-level sections rather than dozens of competing links.
  2. Use descriptive, specific anchor text for internal links to the pages you’d want featured (a labeled link to “Pricing” rather than a generic “click here” pointing at the pricing page).
  3. Avoid orphaned pages, important content with no internal links pointing to it, since Google can’t feature what it can’t confidently place in your site’s structure.
  4. Implement BreadcrumbList consistently across the site, not just on a handful of pages, since Google’s understanding of your hierarchy improves with consistent signal rather than isolated examples.

None of this guarantees sitelinks will appear for any given query. It’s simply what Google’s own guidance points to as the relevant factors, in place of a markup shortcut that doesn’t exist.

Conclusion

Regular sitelinks are earned through structure and authority, not requested through schema, and the one schema feature that used to touch this space, the search box, is gone as of November 2024. BreadcrumbList is the real, current schema investment here. Everything else in this space is site architecture work, not markup work.

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