Because they do two jobs at once. Breadcrumbs help a visitor understand where they are on your site, and they help search engines understand how your pages relate to each other. That double duty is why the advice never quite goes away, even after Google changed how it displays them.
The catch is that most advice about breadcrumbs is a few years out of date. Google changed the rules in 2025, and a lot of blog posts never caught up.
So here is the current picture, with the actual sources named, and our honest view on when breadcrumbs are worth building and when they are not.
A breadcrumb trail is a small row of links near the top of a page that shows the path from your homepage down to the page someone is on. It usually reads left to right, from broad to specific. It is a secondary navigation element, not a replacement for your main menu.
Google describes the purpose plainly in its structured data documentation. A breadcrumb trail "indicates the page's position in the site hierarchy, and it may help users understand and explore a site effectively."
There are two kinds worth knowing about. A hierarchy based trail shows where the page sits in your site structure. A history based trail shows how this particular visitor got here, and can carry filters and sorting back with them.
From mobile results, yes. On 23 January 2025, Google Search Central announced it would "no longer show breadcrumbs on mobile search results in all languages and regions where Google Search is available." Desktop results kept them. The reason Google gave was simple: on small screens the trail was getting cut off.
The post was written by Caitlin Dorsey, a Product Manager on Google Search. Google explained that the visible URL on desktop still has two parts, the domain and the breadcrumb, while on mobile it is now simplified to the domain only.
This is the part people miss. Google was explicit that the markup still matters. In its own words, "If you're using breadcrumb markup, there's nothing you need to do, as we continue to support breadcrumb markup for use in desktop search results."
Google also confirmed that the breadcrumb rich result report in Google Search Console continues, and that you can still implement and test breadcrumb markup in the Rich Results Test. Nothing was deprecated. Only the mobile display changed.
Yes, but for different reasons than people assume. The visual payoff shrank when mobile display went away. The structural payoff did not. Breadcrumbs create consistent internal links from deep pages up to category pages, and that link pattern is what actually moves authority around your site.
Think of a breadcrumb as internal linking that happens automatically and never gets forgotten. Every new page you publish inherits a link to its parent category the moment it goes live.
That consistency is worth more than the rich result ever was. We cover the wider principle in our guide to internal linking for SEO, and breadcrumbs are the cheapest version of it to maintain.
Desktop still shows the trail in the visible URL, which matters more than it sounds. A search result reading yoursite.com then Services then Webflow Development tells a searcher what kind of page they are about to open.
Very little. Google's documentation says BreadcrumbList requires only one property, itemListElement, which holds an array of breadcrumbs in order. Each ListItem inside it needs a position, a name, and an item URL. The item URL is optional on the final breadcrumb, since that page is the one being viewed.
You add it as JSON-LD, using the Schema.org vocabulary, in the head of the page. It is one of the smaller pieces of structured data you will ever write, which is part of why we recommend it.
Google also supports more than one trail per page. Its documentation notes that "if there are multiple ways to navigate to a page on your site, you can specify multiple breadcrumb trails for a single page." Each one becomes its own BreadcrumbList object.
If structured data is new to you, our guide to schema markup explains how JSON-LD fits into a page and how to check it before you ship.
When your site is shallow. Nielsen Norman Group is direct about this. In an article by Page Laubheimer, the group states that "breadcrumbs aren't necessary (or useful) for sites with flat hierarchies that are only 1 or 2 levels deep, or sites that are linear in structure."
That rules out a lot of sites we get asked about. A five page marketing site does not need a trail. Neither does a single funnel landing page, where the whole point is that there is nowhere else to go.
Nielsen Norman Group is equally clear about the other failure mode. Breadcrumbs "should not replace the global navigation bar or the local navigation within a section." They supplement navigation. They are not navigation.
Where they earn their place is on sites with real depth: documentation, large blogs, service directories, and ecommerce catalogues. Our post on website navigation and UX covers how to decide what belongs in the main menu first.
They build one type and stop. Baymard Institute benchmarked 50 major ecommerce sites and found 68% had subpar breadcrumb implementations. Another 23% had no breadcrumbs at all, and 45% offered only one type, usually the hierarchy based one.
Baymard's argument is that there is a legitimate need for both hierarchy based and history based breadcrumbs, because they solve different problems. One helps a person explore sideways into related categories. The other gets them back to the filtered list they came from without losing their settings.
The second one is the one almost everybody skips. Someone filters a catalogue down to what they want, clicks a product, then hits back and finds their filters gone. That is a conversion problem dressed up as a navigation problem.
The other common mistake is a trail that does not match reality. If your breadcrumb says one hierarchy and your URL structure says another, you have taught two different stories to Google and to your visitor.
You build the visual trail with linked text elements in the collection template, then add the JSON-LD separately in the page settings custom code. Webflow does not generate BreadcrumbList markup for you, so the schema is a manual step, and it is the step people forget.
For a blog or a service catalogue, a reference field pointing at the parent category is what makes the middle link dynamic. Without it you end up hardcoding a category name that goes stale the first time you restructure.
We keep the trail markup simple, usually a nav element with an ordered set of links inside it, styled with the same class conventions as the rest of the build. Finsweet's Client First naming keeps that consistent across a large site.
Then we validate. Google's Rich Results Test will tell you within seconds whether the BreadcrumbList parsed, and the breadcrumb report in Google Search Console will confirm it at scale a few days later.
Indirectly, and more than the mobile change suggests. Systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews build an understanding of what a site covers from its structure as well as its words. A clear hierarchy expressed in both links and schema is easier for a model to summarise correctly.
Breadcrumbs also give a page context that its own text might assume. A page titled "Pricing" means very little alone. The same page under Services then Webflow Development then Pricing is unambiguous.
We would not claim breadcrumbs are a ranking lever in AI answers. Nobody can honestly claim that. What we can say is that they cost almost nothing and remove ambiguity, and ambiguity is what gets content misattributed.
Add them if your site is three or more levels deep, and skip them if it is not. If you do add them, add the BreadcrumbList markup at the same time, because the desktop display and the Search Console report both depend on it. Half a breadcrumb implementation is wasted work.
The order we suggest is straightforward. Get your URL structure and categories right first, because the breadcrumb only mirrors what already exists. Then build the trail. Then add the schema. Doing it in the other order means rebuilding twice.
For most of the sites we work on, this is a half day of work that quietly improves internal linking forever. It is not glamorous and it will not show up as a spike in your analytics next week. It is the kind of thing that makes a site easier to grow for the next three years.
If you are not sure whether your site is deep enough to need them, or your structure has drifted since launch, we are happy to take a look and tell you straight. You can find us at phoenix.studio, and we usually reply within a couple of days.
Tell us where you want to go. We'll tell you how we'd get you there.