Breadcrumb Navigation.

The name refers to Hansel and Gretel: like a trail of breadcrumbs, the navigation shows the way back. It usually appears as a horizontal chain near the top of the page — 'Home › Glossary › Breadcrumb Navigation' — with every element clickable except the current one. The trail is deliberately secondary: it supplements the main navigation rather than replacing it, and it reflects the position of this particular page in the hierarchy rather than the whole site map.

For user experience the benefit is orientation. Visitors see at a glance where they are within the hierarchy and can move one level up with a single click, which is far more convenient than reaching for the back button after arriving from a search result. That reduces bounce rate, particularly on deeply nested sites such as online shops with many category levels, where a visitor may land four steps down without ever having seen the pages above.

For SEO the value is twofold. Breadcrumbs strengthen internal linking and give Google a clear picture of the site structure through the nesting they expose. Marked up with BreadcrumbList schema in JSON-LD, the path is often shown directly in the search result instead of the bare URL, which makes the snippet easier to read and communicates context before the click. The markup should mirror the visible trail exactly rather than describing an idealised structure.

An example: an online shop with the path 'Home › Men › Shoes › Sneakers › Model X' makes its category logic visible. Visitors and search engines both understand that the product belongs to the parent category 'Sneakers', and Google can reproduce that structure in the SERP snippet. The same principle applies to a knowledge base or a service site — anywhere the relationship between a page and its parent is not obvious from the page itself.