A breadcrumb trail typically looks like: Home › Category › Sub-category › Page. It appears near the top of a page and lets visitors jump back to any level of the site hierarchy without using the browser back button.
From an SEO standpoint, breadcrumbs serve two roles. First, they reinforce internal link structure and help search engines map relationships between pages. Second, when marked up with BreadcrumbList schema, Google often replaces the raw URL in search results with a readable breadcrumb path — improving click-through rates.
What SearchVitals checks: The Architecture audit detects whether breadcrumb navigation is present and whether it uses valid schema markup. Sites with no breadcrumbs on deep pages are flagged as a notice or warning finding.
Implementation: Use semantic HTML (<nav aria-label="Breadcrumb">) combined with BreadcrumbList JSON-LD structured data.