Everything You Need to Know About Google's New Sitelink Search Box

A question pops into your head, you Google it, and within your search results is…another search box. The M.C. Escher drawing of the Google SERPs, “search within a search” is a new feature Google rolled out in September. Above is how this looks for a search for “Tesla.”

When Do Search Boxes Appear?

The boxes appear when sitelinks appear, only searches where the site get a very high click-through rate (e.g. their brand name).

There’s no way to add a search box, Google determines their presence.

However, there is a code to remove them (below). As a brand though, it seems better to keep the box and soak up the extra pixels in your listing.

The Search Experience

By default, searching within the above search box would not take visitors to a Tesla page (for example) – it would take them to another Google search.

This is a negative for a brand. It’s a chance for competitor ads to nab a visitor and an extra step in the conversion process.

To change this, a different tag (details below) can be added to send visitors directly to your internal search – not another Google search.

It’s unknown how much the search box will be used. However, if you redirect users to your internal search, organic landing page traffic to your internal search could measure the increase.

It’s too early to know for sure, but our data isn’t showing much of a spike from sitelink search usage.

Details on Redirecting to Your Internal Search

You’ll need to add a bit of code to your home page to have your internal search used here.

There’s 2 kinds of code options – JSON-LD and microdata. We’ve now seen live examples of both working, so whichever one is OK.

If you go with the microdata, you can actually hide the if you want. Check out Pinterest’s implementation if you go that route.

It takes 1 to 3 weeks for this change to take place – so don’t panic when it takes a while.

This should help you get a handle on sitelink search, but let us know your own experience. We’ll be certainly watching to see how this evolves in the future.