Google cut breadcrumbs from mobile results; the links still work

Google stopped showing breadcrumbs in mobile search results in January 2025. A guide on Sitebulb’s site by Karyna Barbaziuk, published March 31, 2026, argues that the change removed the least important thing breadcrumbs do. Google’s announcement said breadcrumbs would no longer appear on mobile results in any language or region, and that they would continue to appear on desktop results. Barbaziuk is an SEO strategist with a background in technical SEO, writing a guest guide for Sitebulb, which makes a website crawler.

Her main case is that a breadcrumb trail is a set of internal links written by a template. Every page with a trail links to each of its parent pages up to the homepage, and a new page gets those links as soon as it is published. Her illustration is an ecommerce site with 15,000 products. Each product page links to its subcategory, category, department and homepage without anyone placing those links by hand, so category pages receive a steady stream of links from everything filed under them.

That linking argument never depended on what Google shows in results. Barbaziuk also says the links make category pages stronger, which in turn helps product pages rank, and that consistent trails help Google connect a site to its topics. The guide offers no data for either claim. The dependable benefit is the crawl paths and consistent links to category pages; any ranking lift beyond that is her inference.

The guide is also specific about which trails are worth having. It recommends trails that follow the real site hierarchy and match the URL structure. It warns against history-based trails, which change with each visitor’s route through the site and so cannot be marked up with BreadcrumbList. For ecommerce filter trails, where one product can be reached through several filter combinations, it says to pick one primary path.

Six markup mistakes Sitebulb lists

The guide names six errors in BreadcrumbList markup:

• No markup at all. The visible trail exists, but there is no BreadcrumbList structured data describing it.
• Relative URLs. The item value needs a full URL with the protocol, such as https://example.com/category/product.
• JavaScript-only trails. Barbaziuk writes that “Google can render JavaScript, but it’s slower and less reliable,” and recommends rendering the trail in the server’s HTML.
• Markup that differs from the visible trail. The guide says a mismatch looks like manipulation to Google.
• Missing position or name. Every ListItem needs a position, and every level needs a name.
• Links to non-canonical URLs. The guide says these split authority between versions of the same page.

Two of these can pass a syntax validator: markup that differs from the visible trail, and links to non-canonical URLs. In both cases the markup is valid but points at the wrong URL or describes a trail the page does not show. Catching them takes a crawl that compares each trail against the canonical tags and the visible breadcrumb. The Schema.org BreadcrumbList definition adds one detail worth knowing: the order of items in the markup is not enough to set the order of the trail. The position values do that, and they should be integers, for example starting at 1.

What to do

1. Crawl the site and check that every breadcrumb link resolves to the canonical URL. For products filed in several categories, choose one trail and use it everywhere.
2. View the raw HTML of a template page, not the rendered page, and confirm the trail and its JSON-LD are there before JavaScript runs.
3. Compare the markup with the visible trail on each template type. Names, URLs and order should match.
4. Run a page through Google’s Rich Results Test, then the Schema.org validator, and watch the Breadcrumbs report under Enhancements in Search Console, as the guide suggests.

The guide’s own example uses absolute URLs, starts position at 1, and leaves item off the current page:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "BreadcrumbList",
  "itemListElement": [
    { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 1, "name": "Home", "item": "https://example.com/" },
    { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 2, "name": "SEO Tools", "item": "https://example.com/seo-tools" },
    { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 3, "name": "Technical SEO" }
  ]
}