83% of Top Search Ads Show Sitelinks vs 29% With a Number in the Headline

Search for a mortgage rate, a dentist or a plumber and look at the first ad. Under the headline there is usually a row of extra links: pricing, services, reviews, contact. The headline itself is usually plain words, with no price or percentage. And the click usually goes to a page about what you searched for, though about one time in eight it drops you on the advertiser's homepage.

Every one of those choices is made by the advertiser, and each one costs or earns money. Sitelinks make an ad bigger at no extra cost and feed into the score that decides which ad takes which position. The headline decides whether the searcher clicks. The landing page decides whether that paid click turns into a call or a form. Looking at what the ads in first place actually do shows which of the common tips hold up.

The answer is lopsided. 83.1% of top-position search ads show sitelinks, against 73.1% of ads at the bottom of the page. Numbers in the headline, a favourite copywriting tip, appear in 29% of top-position ads, no more often than in the 30% of all ads. And 12.7% of search ads, top-position ads included, still send the click to a homepage.

In September 2026 we collected the ads shown on Bing desktop search results in the US for keywords in industries from plumbing and dental to mortgage, insurance and senior care. We used Bing, where 421 of 4,454 results pages showed ads, because Microsoft Ads lets advertisers import their Google Ads campaigns directly, so Bing ads largely mirror the ads advertisers run on Google. After removing repeats, that gave 1,388 unique ads from 711 advertisers. The top-position ad is the highest-placed ad on each of the 421 pages. We also grouped every ad by where it appeared: above the regular (unpaid) results, between them or below them.

For each ad we recorded three things. Sitelinks: the extra links under an ad that point to specific pages of the advertiser's site, and how many there are. Numbers: whether the headline, with all its parts joined, contains any digit, and separately a dollar amount, a percentage or a year from 2025 to 2027. Landing page: whether the address the ad sends its click to is the site's front page, meaning nothing follows the domain name.

Winning first place goes with sitelinks, and with little else that stands out. Top-position ads use numbers and homepages at almost exactly the rate of all ads.

That is 350 of the 421 top-position ads. Ad extensions such as sitelinks feed into ad rank on both Google Ads and Microsoft Ads, the score that decides which ad takes which position. An ad with sitelinks is judged more useful and takes up more of the screen, so the advertisers winning the top of the page are the ones that have set them up.

Ads with sitelinks show 5.7 links on average, with a median of 6. Among top-position ads with sitelinks, 4 links was the most common count, on 120 ads, followed by 8 links on 105 ads and 6 links on 67. Four links usually appear as a compact row under the ad; larger sets give the searcher a menu of the advertiser's main pages. Either way, the ad offers several routes into the site instead of one.

122 of the 421 top-position ads, 29%, include at least one digit, against 30% of all 1,388 ads. If numbers helped an ad reach first place, the top ads would use them more often than the rest; they use them slightly less. Specific kinds of number are rarer still.

When top ads do use numbers, the numbers carry information. Typical examples: "9 Best Credit Cards of 2026 | 0% Intro APR Up to 21 Months", "Up To 30% Off Your Project | 24 Mo. No Payments or Interest" and "Mover And Company Near You | 99% Satisfaction Rate". Each number is a rate, an offer or a proof point, not decoration.

That is 176 of 1,388 ads, from a spread of 711 advertisers, so the result reflects a broad habit rather than a few large accounts. Counting language homepages such as /en-us/ as homepages raises the share to 13.8%. A searcher who clicks an ad for termite treatment and lands on a page listing every service a company offers has to find termites, the price and the form alone, and many go back to the results.

Winning the top spot does not fix this. 13.3% of top-position ads went to a homepage, almost exactly the rate for all ads. An advertiser can pay for the most visible position on the page and still send that click to a page that does not mention what was searched.

Position on the page tilts both habits in the same direction. Ads above the regular results carry sitelinks most often and use numbers most often; ads below the results do both least.

From above the results to below them, sitelink use falls 13 points, from 86.2% to 73.1%, and number use falls eight points. Both gaps are small next to the differences between industries: sitelink use runs from 87.2% down to 61.9%, a 25-point spread, and number use from 52.7% down to 14.5%, a 38-point spread.

What an ad does depends heavily on what it sells. The table shows the ten industries measured on all three habits.

Numbers follow the product. Mortgage ads lead at 52.7%, followed by software (46.7%), insurance (45.9%), moving companies (44.4%) and banking and loans (43.2%), categories where a rate, a price or a list count is the pitch itself. Accounting (14.5%), real estate (16%) and HVAC (18.4%) use numbers least, likely because their buyers choose on trust, location and availability more than on a single figure.

Homepages and missing sitelinks cluster in local services. Pest control ads send 28.6% of clicks to a homepage, followed by plastic surgery (27.3%), home remodeling (23.5%) and insurance (23%), and pest control also has the lowest sitelink rate at 61.9%, with HVAC (63.2%) and weddings (64.5%) close behind. At the other end, higher education ads went to a homepage 2.3% of the time, mortgage 5.5% and personal injury law 5.8%, while senior care leads on sitelinks at 87.2%. These are industries where a single student, loan or case is worth enough to justify a page for each program, loan type or practice area.

Add sitelinks first. If your ads have none, add at least four, each pointing to a specific service, offer, pricing or contact page with its own short description. More than eight in ten top ads already carry them, and in trades such as pest control and HVAC, where more than a third of ads run without them, they are one of the quickest ways to look bigger and more helpful than the ad next to yours.

Then check where every ad sends its click. Each ad group should land on the page that answers its search, with the price range, a form and a phone number, not on a homepage that lists everything you offer. A handful of service pages, each with one clear call to action, covers most accounts.

Use numbers when they carry information the searcher wants, such as a rate, a price or a response time, and skip them when they do not: seven in ten top ads have none. In mortgage, software and insurance, where close to half of search ads already show a number, test a version with one against a version without. Our ppc management services check sitelinks, headlines and landing pages for every ad group as a standard step.

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