# What is Breadcrumb navigation?

Breadcrumb navigation is a row of links showing where a page sits in the site hierarchy, usually in the form Home / Section / Page. It helps users orient themselves and gives engines an explicit map of structure.

## How it works

Breadcrumbs reflect the site's hierarchy and link each level back to its parent. Marked up with [BreadcrumbList structured data](/blogs/schema-markup-ai-citations-2026), they let engines display the path in results and understand the parent-child relationships between sections.

They are most valuable on deep sites where a page can sit several levels down, making its context non-obvious from the URL alone.

## Breadcrumb navigation vs internal linking

Breadcrumbs are a specific, hierarchical form of internal linking that always points upward to parent levels. General internal linking is lateral and flexible, connecting any related pages. Breadcrumbs encode the tree; internal links encode the web. A good site uses both.

## Why it matters for B2B

Breadcrumbs give AI engines a clean, structured statement of where a page belongs, which reinforces topical grouping. Your glossary term pages already carry a rawmktg. / Glossary breadcrumb plus BreadcrumbList-friendly structure; mirroring that on the technical glossary keeps each term explicitly tied to its parent set, which strengthens the cluster signal that makes the pages citable.

## Frequently asked questions

**What is breadcrumb navigation?**

Breadcrumb navigation is a row of links showing where a page sits in the site hierarchy, usually as Home / Section / Page. It helps users orient themselves and gives engines an explicit map of structure.

**What are breadcrumbs on a website?**

They are the secondary navigation trail, typically near the top of a page, that links back through each parent level to show the page's position in the site.

**What is breadcrumb schema?**

BreadcrumbList structured data marks up the breadcrumb trail so search engines can understand the hierarchy and display the path in results instead of a raw URL.

**Example**

Pair a visible trail with `BreadcrumbList` schema so engines read the hierarchy and can show it in results.

```
Home / Glossary / Crawl budget
```

*Source: https://rawmktg.com/glossary/breadcrumb-navigation · rawmktg. by Vinayak Ravi*