Android Deep Links and App Links Confused

If you have an app or are developing an app, app indexation and deep linking are things you definitely need to be paying attention to. Basically, Google wants to treat your app like a website. It wants to crawl it and index it so that search results can return specific pages from an app in mobile searches. That ability to return specific pages within an app? That’s deep linking.

What is Deep Linking?

Deep linking, in a general sense, involves linking to specific content within a website or app, rather than to the homepage. Here we’re talking in particular about getting specific elements of an app to show up in search results on a mobile device, allowing users to open an app directly from a search results page. Note: Users will only see this prompt if they have the particular app installed.

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What Is App Indexing?

App indexing is the result of getting your app in Google’s index to enable deep linking. By allowing Google to index pages within your app, features (or promotions) within the app can begin showing up in users’ mobile searches, driving visits (and hopefully conversions) to the app.

What is an App Linking with the example of Facebook

When someone shares content from within an app that has Facebook App Links applied, anyone clicking on that link will be able to access that content through the app. This can be done using an app alternative to existing web content, or app-only content, and works either from ‘web to app’ or ‘app to app’. The feature works with Android, iOS and Windows phones

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App Indexing allows Google to crawl your app content (as it would on a website).

Deep Links vs Android App Links:

App Links are just deep links that have been verified for a website, AND allows opening URLs in the associated app directly without asking the user to select the app (via the disambiguation dialog). With App Links, your app designates itself as the default handler of a given type of link (though the user can override it from device system settings)

A nice overview of the differences is at https://developer.android.com/training/app-links/verify-site-associations?authuser=0

Also see comparison table below, lifted from the above link at the time of writing