Ad Grant campaigns must carry at least two sitelink extensions. Most accounts add two, point both at the homepage, and never look again. That satisfies the rule and wastes the single cheapest click-through-rate improvement available to a grant account.
What a sitelink is
A sitelink is an extra link beneath your ad, with its own headline and its own destination. Instead of one blue line, the ad becomes a small block with three or four routes into the site. It costs nothing extra and it makes the ad physically bigger on the results page.
Size matters more than it sounds. A larger ad occupies more of the screen, pushes competitors down, and gets clicked more often for reasons that have little to do with the copy. On an account fighting to stay above the 5% CTR floor, that is free margin.
The requirement
Two sitelinks minimum, per campaign. They are set at campaign level, so a new campaign starts with none — this is the most common way an otherwise compliant account falls out of compliance months after launch.
Add four to six, not two. Google decides how many to show based on the query, the device and the position. Giving it two means it can only ever show two. Giving it six lets it pick the most relevant pair or four for each search.
Writing sitelinks that earn the click
The rule that decides everything: a sitelink should answer a different question from the main ad. If the ad is about donating and the sitelink says "Donate Now", you have added nothing.
- Give each one a distinct destination. Four sitelinks pointing at the homepage is the version Google's own guidance advises against, and searchers notice.
- Use the description lines. Each sitelink takes two short description lines. Ads with them filled in take more vertical space and give the searcher a reason. Leaving them blank halves the benefit.
- Keep headlines short. Around 25 characters. Long ones get truncated or suppressed on mobile.
- Cover different intents. Someone searching about your cause might want to give, to get help, to volunteer, or to understand what you do. Sitelinks let one ad serve all four.
A worked set
For a food bank running an ad about emergency food support:
| Sitelink | Description | Destination |
|---|---|---|
| Find A Food Bank | Locations and opening hours across the county | /locations |
| How To Get A Parcel | What to bring and who can refer you | /get-help |
| Donate Food | Current shortage list and drop-off points | /donate-food |
| Volunteer With Us | Two hours a week, no experience needed | /volunteer |
| Our Impact Last Year | Parcels distributed and where funding went | /impact |
Five destinations, five distinct reasons, one ad. Compare that with "Home / About Us" and the difference in click-through rate is not subtle.
Campaign-level, not account-level
Sitelinks can be set at account, campaign or ad group level. Account-level ones apply everywhere and are a reasonable safety net, but campaign-level sitelinks are what make the ads good — a Volunteering campaign and a Donations campaign should not be showing the same links.
The arrangement that works: two or three account-level sitelinks as a fallback so no campaign is ever non-compliant, then four to six specific ones on each campaign. Campaign-level overrides account-level, so the specific set wins wherever you have added it.
Where sitelinks quietly break
- A page gets renamed or deleted and the sitelink 404s. Google eventually disapproves it, and if you were at exactly two, the campaign is out of compliance.
- A new campaign launches with none. Sitelinks do not copy across when you duplicate a campaign in every workflow.
- Landing pages point somewhere the grant cannot advertise — a page carrying affiliate links or ads. That is a website policy problem as much as an extension one.
Check them quarterly: Ads & extensions → Extensions → Sitelinks, and look at the status column. Anything not "Approved" needs attention.
Two minutes of work worth doing today
- Filter to campaigns with fewer than four sitelinks.
- For each, write four that answer four different questions.
- Fill both description lines on every one.
- Click each destination URL and confirm it loads.
The other structural minimums — two ad groups, two ads — are covered in the two-ad-group, two-ad minimum.