Recognize that Google's Sitelinks Search Box feature is deprecated and stop maintaining WebSite/SearchAction markup for it
domain: developers.google.com · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Confirm your site isn't still generating or maintaining WebSite + SearchAction JSON-LD solely for the sitelinks search box, since Google retired the feature globally on November 21, 2024
Check whether any internal SEO checklists still reference the archived 'nositelinkssearchbox' guidance, which Google removed along with the feature's documentation
Leave any existing legacy SearchAction markup in place if it serves other purposes - Google confirms unsupported markup doesn't cause errors or ranking impact
Redirect engineering time previously spent on this feature toward currently-supported structured data, since regular sitelinks are still generated algorithmically without the search box
Update internal SEO documentation/checklists that still list sitelinks search box implementation as an active task
Known gotchas
This is a case where following older, still-circulating SEO guides wastes effort - the feature no longer appears in Google Search regardless of markup
Removal of the search box doesn't affect regular sitelinks or rankings, so there is no downside to leaving legacy markup in place, only wasted effort adding new markup
Third-party checklists and older blog posts have not all been updated to reflect the November 2024 deprecation
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