Google Replaces A Site’s URL In Search Results & Uses Its Site Name & Breadcrumb Path

Google announced they’ve begun replacing the URL within the search result snippet area with a site name and breadcrumb path. This only impacts the mobile search results but may roll out wider over time.

Google said that starting today they have updated their “algorithms that display URLs in the search results to better reflect the names of websites, using the real-world name of the site instead of the domain name, and the URL structure of the sites in a breadcrumbs-like format.” Google has actually been testing this for a few years now, it was not uncommon for searchers to see these tests over the past few years.

With that, they are giving webmasters a way to better communicate the site name and breadcrumb data through structured data schema. The schema markup to specify the site name can be found here and the schema for breadcrumb can be found here. It is basically a little extra markup you can add to your source code in order to communicate these variables to Google.

Here is what the search results looked like before and after, not this is still rolling out:

Google said these changes are rolling out gradually and affect only mobile results. The site name change is US-only for now and breadcrumbs are rolling out worldwide.