Sitelink Assets

An offer you set up eight months ago is still running under your Google search ads, and nobody has looked at it since. The campaign reads as healthy from the top - impressions, clicks, and spend all moving. The row of small blue links beneath the headline is where an old promotion can sit unnoticed.

Those links are sitelink assets. You author them once and attach them to a campaign or ad group; Google then decides which ones surface on a given search, and how many. That split is the reason they drift out of date without tripping any alarm.

Graza’s nine-month sitelink and Fresh Clean Threads’ expired coupon

“20% Off The Starter Kit” is the single most common promotional line across Graza’s entire Google account, appearing 11+ times from June 2025 through March 2026, per d2cplay’s teardown of Graza’s Google ads. It runs as a sitelink across search, display, and shopping, sitting next to links like “Why Graza is Better Oil” and “Cold-Pressed for Flavor.” The teardown reads it as the permanent conversion lever - a standing offer expressed as an asset, not a seasonal push.

Fresh Clean Threads ran the same surface in reverse. Two of its active search ads still carried “Labor Day · 20% off All Orders Code LDW20 · Valid Aug 26 - Sep 2” when they were last shown on March 14, 2026 - roughly six months after that code expired, per d2cplay’s teardown of Fresh Clean Threads’ Google ads. The teardown flags it as a likely stale sitelink or extension that nobody updated.

Same asset type, two accounts. One brand made it the most durable offer it runs. The other left a dead coupon live for half a year.

Why a stale sitelink survives that long

Nothing in the default setup expires a sitelink. It stays eligible until someone edits or removes it, which is how an August code reaches the following March still attached to live ads.

Google does offer a control for exactly this. Sitelinks can be scheduled with start and end dates, so a Labor Day link can be set to stop showing on its own, per Google’s sitelink asset documentation. It is optional and easy to skip during setup, and a link created without an end date has none.

The rest of it is that you never fully control which sitelinks appear. Google serves a subset based on relevance and predicted performance, and needs at least two configured before it shows any. A brand watching topline CTR has little reason to audit one link that may not even be serving on most queries.

The descriptions most accounts leave blank

Each sitelink can carry two description lines under its link text, and most accounts submit the link alone. Those descriptions unlock the expanded format that takes up more vertical space in the results - which is where a large share of the reported CTR lift comes from, per Google’s guidance.

The size of the effect scatters widely between advertisers. One agency reported its click-through rate doubling within 24 hours of adding sitelink descriptions, in a 2026 write-up from SF Digital. I read that as a single-account anecdote rather than a benchmark, but it points at the same lever - the description line, the part most accounts never fill in.