Short answer
Sitelinks are generated automatically and their loss usually reflects a change in site structure, internal linking, or how confidently Google understands your navigation. They are not awarded or withdrawn as a reward. Their absence is a symptom worth reading rather than a problem to fix directly.
There is no sitelinks setting, no request form and no way to earn them directly.
That frustrates people, but it also makes this diagnosis unusually clean. If they disappeared, something about your site changed. Find that instead.
What sitelinks actually signal
Google shows them when it is confident about two things.
- It understands your site structure. Which pages matter and how they relate.
- The query is navigational. Someone searching your brand wants a specific section, not your homepage.
Losing them usually means confidence in the first dropped, or the query stopped being read as navigational.
The usual causes
| Cause | Measurement | Fixable? |
|---|---|---|
| Navigation changed | Compare menus against an archived version | Yes |
| URLs changed without full redirects | Test old URLs for 404s | Yes |
| Internal links were cut | Internal links report in Search Console | Yes |
| Key pages deindexed | Pages report exclusion reasons | Yes |
| Menu now rendered by JavaScript | Read the rendered HTML in URL Inspection | Yes |
| Brand query no longer read as navigational | Search your brand and see the result shape | Not directly |
The first five are all structural and all recoverable. The sixth is a judgement about intent that you cannot address head-on.
Check these four first
- Are the pages that used to appear still indexed? Run URL Inspection on each. A deindexed page cannot be a sitelink.
- Is your main navigation in the HTML? Not loaded after a script runs.
- Did internal linking change? A removed footer block or related-posts module cuts hundreds of links at once.
- Did URLs change recently? Sitelinks point at specific addresses. Break those and the links go.
Three of these four are usually caused by a redesign, which is covered in traffic dropped after a website redesign.
What this costs you
Less than it looks, in most cases.
Sitelinks mostly appear on brand searches, where the person was already looking for you. Losing them costs some convenience and some visual footprint. It rarely costs the click.
Check the actual numbers before spending anything. Filter Search Console to your brand queries and compare clicks before and after. If clicks held, this is cosmetic.
Read it as a symptom instead
This is the useful framing. Sitelinks vanishing is often the first visible sign of a structural change that will cause other problems.
- If internal linking was cut, deeper pages are being crawled less too.
- If navigation moved behind JavaScript, Google may be missing more than the menu.
- If key pages deindexed, that is a much bigger issue than the sitelinks.
Chase the cause, not the feature. Sitelinks return on their own once the structure is understood again.
What does not work
- Adding sitelinks schema. There is no such markup. Sitelink search box schema is a different feature entirely.
- Demoting sitelinks in Search Console. That tool was retired years ago.
- Requesting them. There is no process and no form.
- Waiting for a core update. This is structural understanding, not a quality judgement.
This is not worth chasing if
- Your brand clicks held. Nothing was lost but the display.
- Nothing structural changed. Sitelinks fluctuate on their own.
- It has been under two weeks. They come and go.
- You also lost rankings broadly. Then this is a symptom and the demotion is the problem.
If your brand search changed more broadly than the sitelinks, my brand name is not ranking first anymore covers the wider diagnosis.
Cosmetic, or the first sign of something structural?
Sitelinks vanishing is often how a crawling or internal linking problem announces itself. Send your Search Console access and within 48 hours I will tell you whether anything underneath it needs fixing.
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