Breadcrumb navigation trails: Crawl Audit check 137

Short answer: a breadcrumb trail, such as Home › Shop › Kettles, shows where a page sits on the site and lets people step back up. It's most useful on sites with several levels. Check 137 is informational and always passes: it notes whether breadcrumbs are present.

What Crawl Audit checks

• Pass: an element with "breadcrumb" in its class, a <nav> labelled as breadcrumbs, or BreadcrumbList microdata.
• Pass: none, with a note that breadcrumbs help deep sites and are optional otherwise.

Breadcrumbs added only as JSON-LD aren't counted here; check 12 covers the structured data.

What the sources say

• Google: "A breadcrumb trail on a page indicates the page's position in the site hierarchy, and it may help users understand and explore a site effectively."
• Nielsen Norman Group: "Breadcrumbs augment but do not replace those main forms of navigation." And: "The last breadcrumb (denoting the current page) should not be a link."

The markup

<nav aria-label="Breadcrumb">
  <ol>
    <li><a href="/">Home</a></li>
    <li><a href="/shop">Shop</a></li>
    <li aria-current="page">Kettles</li>
  </ol>
</nav>

Pair it with BreadcrumbList structured data that matches the visible trail (check 12).

Sources

• Google Search Central, Breadcrumb structured data (updated 8 September 2026), checked 6 October 2026.
• Nielsen Norman Group, Breadcrumbs: 11 design guidelines for desktop and mobile.