The tech giant confirms the removal of the decade-old search feature starting November

The tech giant has made a change to its search engine over a decade after introducing an extra box within some search results, which encouraged users to explore certain websites in more detail.

The sitelinks box appeared underneath a link for a particular website, which featured other links on the same site.

Now, Google has confirmed the small tweak will be made next month.

"It's been over ten years since we initially announced the sitelinks search box in Google Search, and over time, we've noticed that usage has dropped," the company confirmed in a blog post. "With that -- and to help simplify the search results -- we'll be removing this visual element starting on Nov. 21, 2024. This change will apply globally across all search results, in all languages and countries."

Google has made it clear that this won't "affect rankings or the other sitelinks visual element and won't be listed in the Search status dashboard."

"Once we stop showing sitelinks search box elements in Search, we'll remove the Search Console rich results report for it and stop highlighting the markup in the Rich Results Test," they continued.

Google added that while "you can remove sitelinks search box structured data from your site, there's no need to do so" because "unsupported structured data like this won't cause issues in Search, and won't trigger errors in Search Console reports."