TL;DR: Sitelinks add up to 20 extra clickable links below your Google Ads. Start with at least 3, covering adjacent services and key pages like prices, about, and contact. The most common mistake we find: accepting Google’s auto-populated sitelinks, which lack description lines. Always build them manually with both description fields filled in.

How to Set Up Google Ads Sitelinks (And Why You Should Never Let Google Choose Them For You)

This post is based on a video Peterson published on the Creekside Marketing YouTube channel: Adding Site Links to Google Ads Campaign.

Sitelinks are one of the most underutilized assets in Google Ads. Every campaign can have them, and they give your ad three to four additional clickable options for a searcher on a single impression. Yet most accounts we review have them set up poorly, or not at all, because the auto-population feature inside Google Ads creates a false impression that the work is already done.

It is not. Here is how to actually do this right.

How to Add Sitelinks in Google Ads

Adding sitelinks in Google Ads is straightforward once you know where to look. During campaign setup, scroll down to the bottom of the page to the “add setup” section. Click Edit and you will see the sitelinks interface, where Google displays any existing assets you have created along with auto-suggested sitelinks it has pulled from your website.

From here, to create a new sitelink manually, click Create and fill in three things:

Final URL: the specific page on your website the sitelink will point to
Sitelink text: the clickable label that appears in the ad, up to 35 characters
Two description lines: short supporting copy that describes what the visitor will find on that page

Repeat this for each sitelink you want to add. Copy the actual URL from your website rather than typing it from memory. Errors in the final URL will send paid traffic to a broken page, and that is a problem that can run silently for weeks if no one checks.

Why Auto-Populated Sitelinks Are a Problem

Auto-populated sitelinks are the most common sitelink mistake we find when auditing Google Ads accounts. Google creates them in the background and displays them pre-checked in the interface, which makes the setup look finished. The problem is that these assets almost never have description lines filled in. They are just a URL and a text label, with no supporting copy to tell the searcher what they will actually find when they click.

Peterson is direct about this in the video: “Just uncheck them and go back in and create them yourself, just to make sure that you put in all the relevant information that you would like people to see about the page that they could be potentially clicking to.”

The distinction between a properly built sitelink and an auto-populated one is easy to see. A sitelink that says “About” tells someone nothing. A sitelink that says “About” with description lines like “Meet Our Owners” and “Serving Chattanooga Since 2015” gives a searcher a real reason to click and a sense of what the business actually is. The first version costs nothing to accept. The second version costs ten minutes to build. The difference in quality is significant.

Which Pages Make the Best Sitelinks

This is the decision most advertisers get wrong. The default is to link to Home, Contact, and maybe Services, and call it done. The more useful framing is to think about what adjacent pages your ideal customer might want to see, even if they did not specifically search for them.

Adjacent services: If your campaign promotes lawn mowing, homeowners who need lawn mowing very often also need hedge trimming or mulching. Those are different services, but the audience overlap is near-total. Linking to those service pages as sitelinks gives searchers who already clicked your ad another path to engage rather than bouncing.

According to the video, this adjacent-service logic is one of the primary reasons to use sitelinks in service businesses: “If for example you’re promoting lawn mowing but homeowners might also need hedge trimming or mulching, those are all adjacent services that you could put as site links.”

Pages that do conversion work: Some pages convert better than the contact form. A prices page removes uncertainty about cost. A portfolio or gallery page shows proof of quality. A specials or discounts page creates urgency. These pages tend to be under-linked in campaigns because advertisers focus only on the main landing page, but they can be meaningful secondary conversion paths.

Page types that consistently work as sitelinks (directly from the video guidance):

Browse the actual website before building your sitelinks. You will almost always find pages you had not considered that would make strong assets.

How Many Sitelinks Do You Actually Need

Google allows up to 20 sitelinks per campaign. We do not recommend filling all 20 unless every one is genuinely relevant and the campaign has the volume to generate meaningful data on each asset. Sitelinks that are filler dilute the overall asset quality.

The practical floor is 3. Three sitelinks gives your campaign enough variety for Google to rotate assets and see which combinations perform, while keeping every option genuinely useful to a searcher.

More spend justifies more sitelinks because more spend means more clicks, more impressions, and more data on which assets are performing. As Peterson explains in the video: “The larger your campaign and the more money you’re spending, obviously the more data you’re collecting, the more clicks you’re going to get to your account, and so the more site links that you can have and the more likely they are to be proven successful.”

A reasonable framework: start with 3 to 5 sitelinks that are all clearly useful, then expand to 8 to 10 as your campaign matures and you have more relevant pages to link. Only go beyond 10 if you genuinely have that many distinct pages worth sending paid traffic to.

A Practical Example: Building a Sitelink Set for a Service Business

Here is how sitelink selection looks in practice, using the Chattanooga Skydiving example from the video. A campaign promoting tandem jumps has several pages that each answer a different question a searcher might have before booking, and the goal is to match each sitelink to a specific type of intent, not just add links for the sake of filling slots.

From the video, the Chattanooga Skydiving example includes:

About page: builds trust for first-time buyers deciding whether to book
First Jump page: specifically aimed at people who have never skydived and want to understand what to expect before committing
Location pages: for the specific areas they serve, useful for searchers who want to confirm proximity

Each sitelink answers a different question the searcher might have. The about page handles “can I trust this business.” The first jump page handles “what is this actually going to be like.” The location pages handle “are they close enough to me.” None of these questions can be answered by the main ad alone.

A formatted sitelink set for this type of campaign might look like this:

Every row has both description lines. Every destination is a real, relevant page. None of them are auto-populated.

The Check Most People Skip Before Publishing

Before you publish the campaign, look at the sitelinks section one final time. Auto-populated sitelinks that Google pre-selected can appear checked alongside the sitelinks you just manually created, and the two groups are listed together in the same interface without a visual separator that would make the problem obvious.

Uncheck any auto-populated sitelinks that are missing descriptions. This is a five-second check that prevents low-quality assets from rotating alongside your carefully built ones. Peterson specifically flags this in the video because it is easy to overlook when you are moving quickly through campaign setup.

Common Questions About Google Ads Sitelinks

Below are the questions we hear most often when walking clients through sitelink setup for the first time. The answers cover the most common points of confusion around descriptions, reuse across campaigns, timing, and what to do when the website does not yet have enough pages to link.

How many description lines does each sitelink need? Two. Both should be filled in. A sitelink without description lines is a weaker asset, and Google’s auto-populated sitelinks are the most common source of blank descriptions in accounts we review. If you are going through the effort of adding sitelinks, fill in the descriptions. It takes 30 seconds per sitelink.

Can I reuse sitelinks across multiple campaigns? Yes. Once created, sitelinks are stored in your account’s asset library and can be applied to additional campaigns without rebuilding them from scratch.

What if my website only has a few pages to link to? Build what you have and treat it as a signal to improve the site. A prices page, a before-and-after gallery, and a contact page are all pages worth creating specifically because they make useful sitelinks. If you are about to launch a Google Ads campaign and your website has fewer than five distinct pages worth linking to, fixing that before launch will improve your campaign performance beyond just the sitelink benefit.

When should I expand beyond 3 sitelinks? When your campaign has enough volume to generate meaningful click data on the assets you already have. The more budget and clicks your campaign generates, the more useful it is to have additional sitelinks so Google can learn which ones resonate with different searcher segments. The ceiling is 20, but you should only go there if every sitelink is genuinely relevant.

Should sitelinks point to the same page as my main landing page? Not all of them. One or two might logically point back to your main page (for example, a “Book Online” sitelink might point to the same page as your main ad), but the value of sitelinks is that they give searchers additional options, not more ways to reach the same destination.

Where Sitelinks Fit in Your Broader Campaign Setup

Sitelinks are one of several setup decisions that compound over time. Getting them right on day one means every impression your ad serves includes additional pathways for a searcher to engage with your business. But they are one piece of a properly configured campaign.

We have written about the campaign setting mistakes we find in nearly every account we audit: the most common Google Ads campaign setting mistakes and how to fix them. If you are setting up a new campaign, review that checklist alongside this one.

For ongoing account management, sitelinks are part of the weekly review system we run across all active accounts. We check which assets are serving, which are being rotated out, and whether new pages on the site warrant new sitelinks: the weekly Google Ads management checklist we use for every account.

The Short Version

Sitelinks take under an hour to set up properly. They give your ads more surface area on the page and more ways for a searcher to connect with your business before deciding to click.

The only rule that really matters: build them yourself. Do not accept Google’s auto-populated assets without checking that both description lines are filled in. That one step, applied consistently, keeps your sitelink quality higher than the majority of accounts we see in audits.

Start with at least 3. Use adjacent services, proof pages, and transactional pages like prices or contact. Fill in both description lines for each one. Then leave them alone and let the data accumulate.

If you want more breakdowns like this, I write a weekly newsletter about what is actually working inside the ad accounts we manage. Real wins, real losses, no fluff. Subscribe to the Creekside newsletter.

About the Author

Peterson Rainey is the founder of Creekside Marketing, a hands-on paid ads agency managing $20M+ in Google and Meta ad spend across healthcare, home services, SaaS, and e-commerce. He produced the original video tutorial this post is based on and trains every team member on the sitelink setup process before they touch a client account.