Shows visitors at a glance where they are on the site: Home, the pages in between and the current page. Separators are added automatically and Google automatically receives the right structured data (BreadcrumbList) — good for your findability. The technical name is Breadcrumbs.
Use breadcrumbs on any page that sits more than one level deep — category pages, product pages, articles within a section. They give visitors a quick way back up the hierarchy without repeatedly hitting the browser back button, which keeps deep pages from feeling like dead ends.
The BreadcrumbList structured data is the real SEO value: Google often renders the trail directly in search results instead of the raw URL, making your listing easier to scan and signalling the page's place in the site. This pairs well with the page's own SEO settings.
Example: a webshop with /shop/ → /shop/shoes/ → /shop/shoes/running/ shows Home / Shop / Shoes / Running as a trail, so a visitor can jump straight back to the category instead of searching again.
Where breadcrumbs help most
On a webshop, breadcrumbs matter most on product and category pages, where visitors land from search or a filtered listing and need a fast way back to the parent category — /shop/ → /shop/shoes/ → /shop/shoes/running/. On a portfolio site they work well on individual case studies grouped under a discipline, such as /work/ → /work/branding/ → /work/branding/acme-rebrand/. On a services site for a professional firm, they clarify how a specific service relates to its parent offering, for example /services/ → /services/tax-advice/ → /services/tax-advice/vat-returns/. In each case the trail reflects the same hierarchy visitors already use to navigate the menu, so it never introduces a second, conflicting structure.
A common mistake is adding breadcrumbs to a homepage or other top-level page, where there is no hierarchy to show and the block only adds visual noise. Another is building a trail that doesn't match the site's actual URL structure or main navigation — if the menu groups a page one way and the breadcrumb trail implies another, visitors (and Google) get conflicting signals about the page's place in the site. Keep the trail and the menu structure in sync.
Breadcrumbs combine naturally with other navigational blocks: use TableOfContents for orientation within a long page and Pagination for moving between pages of a list, while Breadcrumbs itself handles moving up and down the hierarchy. On a page that's part of a linear series — a multi-step guide, for instance — pair it with RecordNav for previous/next links, since the two solve different navigation problems (hierarchy versus sequence).
Because the trail renders as plain text for the current page and links for everything above it, screen readers correctly announce which item is the current location rather than reading it as another clickable link. The block itself adds no client-side JavaScript, so it has no measurable effect on page performance — the only cost is the structured data payload, which is small and only benefits crawlers.
Example
The prompt for this example
Put a breadcrumb trail at the top of the page: Home, Features and then this page.