Breadcrumb navigation

What are breadcrumbs used for?

For visitors, breadcrumbs are an orientation aid on sites with several levels, such as online stores, documentation, or large content hubs. Someone who lands on a product page from search can see at once which category it belongs to. Nielsen Norman Group recommends breadcrumbs as a supplement to the main navigation. The trail should reflect the site structure. The pages a user visited during the session don’t belong in it.

For SEO, breadcrumbs add internal links that point up to category and parent pages. Google also uses breadcrumb markup to categorize the information on a page in search results. Its documentation recommends trails that represent a typical user path to the page. The trail doesn’t have to mirror the URL structure.

How are breadcrumbs marked up?

Google reads breadcrumbs from BreadcrumbList structured data in JSON-LD, Microdata, or RDFa. A list needs at least two ListItem entries. Each entry has a position, a name, and an item with the URL. For the last entry, item can be left out, and Google then uses the URL of the current page. Including the home page or the current page is optional. If a page can be reached through different paths, several trails are allowed.

For accessibility, the W3C WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices place the trail in a navigation landmark with a label and mark the link to the current page with aria-current="page".

How does Google display breadcrumbs?

Since January 2025, Google shows only the domain in the visible URL of mobile search results. The breadcrumb path no longer appears there because it was often cut off on small screens. Desktop results still show breadcrumbs, and the breadcrumb report in Search Console remains available.

Example

Visible trail on a product page:

<nav aria-label="Breadcrumb">
  <a href="/">Home</a> ›
  <a href="/shoes/">Shoes</a> ›
  <a href="/shoes/running/">Running shoes</a> ›
  <span aria-current="page">Model X</span>
</nav>

Matching structured data:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "BreadcrumbList",
  "itemListElement": [
    {"@type": "ListItem", "position": 1, "name": "Shoes", "item": "https://www.example.com/shoes/"},
    {"@type": "ListItem", "position": 2, "name": "Running shoes", "item": "https://www.example.com/shoes/running/"},
    {"@type": "ListItem", "position": 3, "name": "Model X"}
  ]
}
</script>

FAQ

What are breadcrumbs on a website? A secondary navigation that shows the path from the home page to the current page as a row of links.

Last updated: October 8, 2026