53 of 99 Ukrainian websites have no breadcrumb markup: what the repeat measurement of 19 niches showed

On 7 and 8 August 2026 we externally measured 102 Ukrainian websites in 19 niches: car repair, construction companies, building materials, power tools, fitness, stationery, furniture, healthcare, real estate, optics, education, household chemicals, restaurants, beauty salons, textiles, tourism, footwear, legal services, jewelry stores. On 17 September 2026 we repeated the same measurement, and every figure below comes from the repeat, in which 99 sites responded.

The measurement was external, with no access to anyone else’s admin panels: time to first response as the median of several runs, the catalog from the sitemap with URL deduplication, counters in the homepage HTML, the PHP version from headers, hreflang, TLS, robots.txt, the canonical URL and the presence of structured data. Two points about the method are worth stating up front: sites that answered our script with an anti-bot stub page instead of content are excluded from every count, and we now look for breadcrumb markup not only on the homepage but on a product page as well.

One result turned out to be almost identical across all niches: 79 of 99 sites have no breadcrumb markup on the homepage — that is 80%. Counting a product page too, 53 of 99 have none anywhere — 54%.

What breadcrumb markup is and why it is not cosmetic

Breadcrumbs on a page are the “Home → Category → Product” chain that shows where exactly a person is right now. BreadcrumbList markup is the same chain described in machine format in the page code so that a search engine can read it.

The difference between visual breadcrumbs and the markup is fundamental. Visual breadcrumbs help people. The markup determines what exactly Google shows in search results instead of the bare site address: instead of example.com/catalog/id-58312, the snippet shows a clear path, Home → Furniture → Sofas. This is the point where a person decides whether to click.

One more factor is just as important: breadcrumbs explain the site structure to a search engine regardless of how tidy the internal links are. For a large catalog, this is one of the cheapest ways to show the hierarchy.

Figures by niche

Looking at each niche’s sample separately, the homepage picture is as follows (the first number is how many sites have no breadcrumb markup, the second is how many were checked). The chain is not really needed on the homepage itself, so these figures show something else: whether the site template has breadcrumb markup at all.

• building materials — 6 of 6
• optics — 7 of 7
• textiles — 5 of 5
• fitness — 5 of 5
• footwear — 5 of 5
• power tools — 4 of 4
• stationery — 4 of 4
• healthcare — 4 of 4
• jewelry — 4 of 4
• restaurants — 6 of 7
• tourism — 4 of 5
• education — 4 of 6
• household chemicals — 4 of 6
• furniture — 3 of 4
• real estate — 3 of 4
• legal — 3 of 4
• beauty salons — 3 of 5
• construction companies — 3 of 8
• car repair — 2 of 6

In nine niches out of nineteen, not a single checked site had breadcrumb markup on the homepage. The best situation is among car repair shops: 2 of 6 lack it there.

34% have no structured data at all

Breadcrumbs are one of the types of structured data. We separately counted whether the homepage had any Schema.org markup at all: organization, local business, product, website, search box. 34 of 99 sites had none — 34%.

This means that a third of the checked sites do not describe themselves in machine format at all: the search engine sees only the page text and has to guess what the organization is, where it is located and what it sells.

By niche, the worst situation is in fitness (5 of 5 without structured data) and restaurants (5 of 7). The best is in furniture, textiles and legal services, where not a single site in the sample was without markup.

Why this particular mistake is so widespread

The reason is most likely not laziness but the way these sites were built. Breadcrumb markup does not add itself: if the template does not include it, it will only appear when someone deliberately sets the task of adding it. In a typical “build us a website” project nobody sets that task, because the owner does not know about it and the contractor does not suggest it — it is not visible in the mockup and does not affect how the site looks at acceptance.

The second factor is website builders and ready-made themes. Some of them add the markup automatically, some do not, and without a targeted check there is no way to see the difference: the site looks the same.

How to check this on your own site in five minutes

The check requires neither access nor paid tools:

1. Open any product or service page on your site.
2. View the page source (Ctrl+U in most browsers).
3. Search the code for BreadcrumbList. If there are no matches, there is no breadcrumb markup.
4. In the same place, search for application/ld+json — these are structured data blocks. If there are none, the site does not describe itself in machine format at all.

It is also worth running the same page through Google’s official rich results test: it shows not only whether the markup is present but also the errors in it — to a search engine, markup with an error is the same as no markup.

What this measurement does not prove

The samples in each niche are small: from 4 to 8 sites. This means that the figure for a specific niche is not “the state of the market” but the state of those specific sites on the date of the check. The overall picture across 99 sites is statistically more solid, but it too applies to the segment we looked at: sites that are visible in search for general commercial queries, not the entire Ukrainian web.

One more limitation: the presence of markup does not mean it is correct. We checked whether it was there, not whether it complied with the specification. So among the 46 of 99 sites where we did find breadcrumb markup on at least one of the two pages checked, not all of it is correct.

And most importantly: we did not investigate the causes and did not establish who made changes on other people’s sites. This is a snapshot of the state on the measurement date, not an assessment of the work of those who built these sites.

What to do about it

If your site has no breadcrumb markup anywhere — as with those 53 of 99 — it is not a disaster and not an emergency. But it is one of the cheapest items in technical SEO: breadcrumb markup is added once to the template and then works on every page without separate maintenance. Compared with rewriting texts or restructuring the catalog, this is a job of hours, not weeks.

The order in which we usually do it: first, organization and website structured data on the homepage, then breadcrumbs on all internal pages, then product markup with price and availability on product cards. Each step is checked with the rich results test right after implementation — precisely because markup with an error achieves nothing.