Google's Newest Search Ad Format, Loved and Hated by Brands
‘Sitelinks’ Work Really Well — Too Well — for Marketers Choking on Costs Per Click — NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — The most significant change to Google's search ads in years could be the most controversial to the nation's biggest brands.
Context & Ripple Effects
Sitelinks lands at the end of a three-year run of Google steadily enlarging what an ad can occupy on its own results pages: the clickable-area experiments inside AdWords units back in 2007 tested how much of an ad should be interactive, and in 2009 Google put paid listings directly into Google News search results. Sitelinks extends the same logic — one advertiser, multiple destinations under a single headline — and Google itself frames it as the most significant change to search ads in years.
The friction point named in the report is cost: marketers already choking on rising costs per click are being handed a format that works so well it deepens their dependence on the auction. For big brands whose names trigger these ads, the love-hate split is structural — the format performs, but performing means paying Google for traffic to pages the brand may already own organically.
First-order effects
- Big-brand advertisers must now decide link-by-link which destinations to attach to their brand-term ads, adding a new layer of campaign management — and new spend — to accounts that were previously single-destination bids.
Second-order effects
- A richer ad unit raises the value of winning top position, pressuring rivals who bid on the same brand terms to match the format or cede clicks, which feeds the cost-per-click squeeze AdAge reports marketers are already feeling.
Third-order effects
- If format expansion keeps outpacing organic real estate, the search results page consolidates into Google-controlled inventory where even a brand's own name routes through paid placement — a shift in who owns the click path between query and site.
The trend: Search advertising is evolving from text links to expandable, multi-destination ad real estate, with format innovation serving as Google's primary lever on auction revenue.