Opens in a new tabSkip to content
Agent LighthouseAgent Lighthouse

    Searches the text of every published page. The evidence sources themselves are not in this index — search all of them on the trusted sources page.

    GitHub ↗
    Browse checks and page contents
    structured-data/breadcrumb-schema

    BreadcrumbList schema

    What it checks

    AI agents use BreadcrumbList to understand your site hierarchy and navigate between parent/child pages. Without breadcrumbs, agents cannot infer where a page sits in your content tree, making it harder to provide contextual answers that reference related pages.

    Why it matters

    Google Search parses BreadcrumbList markup in the body of a page and uses it to categorize that page and render a breadcrumb trail in the search result, in place of the raw URL.

    Evidence

    • Google: “Google Search uses breadcrumb markup in the body of a web page to categorize the information from the page in search results.” Required shape: an itemListElement array; each ListItem requires position (“Position 1 signifies the beginning of the trail”), name and item (item “is not required” for the last element) — developers.google.com/…/breadcrumb (verified 2026-08-21)
    • Breadcrumb remains a live feature in Google’s structured data gallery: “Navigation that indicates the page’s position in the site hierarchy.” — developers.google.com/…/search-gallery (verified 2026-08-21)
    • Adoption: BreadcrumbList found on 6.2M domains in the October 2024 Common Crawl, and on 5.66% of mobile pages — webdatacommons.org/…/stats.html and almanac.httparchive.org/…/structured-data (both verified 2026-08-21)

    Limits

    The audit’s stated mechanism — that AI agents use BreadcrumbList to “navigate between parent/child pages” — has no documented consumer; no LLM or assistant vendor names BreadcrumbList, and Apple’s Applebot type list does not include it. Google’s own guidance contradicts the audit’s URL-depth applicability gate: “We recommend providing breadcrumbs that represent a typical user path to a page, instead of mirroring the URL structure.” Google also disclaims any special schema requirement for AI Overviews and AI Mode — developers.google.com/…/ai-features (verified 2026-08-21). A controlled fetch test found that data present only in JSON-LD was read by 0 of 5 AI systems on direct retrieval — searchviu.com/…/schema-markup-and-ai-in-2025-what-c… (verified 2026-08-21)

    How it scores

    A vendor doc names the consumer (Google Search), states the behavior verbatim, and specifies the required shape of the signal; adoption is at web scale.

    Sources