Google’s John Mueller recently explained that a sitelinks search box can take up to a month to appear in search results.
This topic came up during a Google Webmaster Central hangout where a question was asked regarding how long it takes for a sitelinks search box to show in the SERPs.
Compared to other types of markup, a sitelinks search box can take a long time to appear.
Mueller says this is because Google wants to make sure it’s something that will be available on a site for the long run.
With other types of markup, Google can crawl it once or twice and then show it in search results. A sitelinks search box, on the other hand, can take up to a month to show up.
So don’t get discouraged if you’ve implemented the sitelinks search box markup aren’t seeing it in Google yet.
Mueller also advises that Google is not obligated to display a sitelinks search box just because the markup is being used.
As with any other type of structured data, Google may or may not decide to display a rich result. Usually that depends on whether it will be useful to a searcher’s query.
Hear Mueller’s full response below, starting at the 43:06 mark:
“One of the things that I’ve seen with the sitelinks search box is, if you set up the markup for this on your site, then this is something that takes quite a long time to actually be in effect.
So it’s not like other types of content where we can maybe crawl that page once or twice and then we can show that rich result type in the search results.
A sitelinks search box is something that we really need to see for the long run. Sometimes it takes a month, maybe even longer, to be visible in the search results.”