alt Hacker News> It can aid web crawlers in understanding the semantic structure of your site, qualifying you for richer link previews, and even potentially improving your search ranking.
This is fighting the last war, to stretch a metaphor.
As far as I and my WWW site are concerned, Google has nowadays switched to giving people lengthy LLM-generated versions of my stuff, with errors, above pointing people to my actual stuff. 'Breadcrumbs' and getting a pretty display name instead of the domain name, don't address the fact that Google de-prioritizes all of that, pretty tweaks or no, nowadays.
This is a lot of effort for stuff that people visiting my actual site directly will never see, and which people using Google will not find above the fold of its own massively LLM-ized version of stuff.
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No kidding. Our own business now comes up with this in a Google search:
an $STATE-based IT firm that specializes in building practical AI workflows and information management solutions for midwestern businesses. Operating with an agile, fixed-fee engagement model, the company focuses on avoiding enterprise bloat while delivering concrete results.
It then mixes in the name of a competitor with a similar (but certainly not the same) business name, and lists me as a principal. On the plus side, it only lists our contact info since the other people have their contact info hidden behind a "book an engagement" form.
Yeah, I don't even permit Google to crawl and index my site any more.
Yep. For years we loaded up web sites with "microdata" tags and attributes in the hope that they would drive traffic.
All it did was train Google's AI so people would never leave Google.
I have now started including Google in the "bots get a 10GB zipbomb when they hit the site".
They add nothing of value, now, and only cause more problems.
If you want a world where the data you present like this matters, seed it.
Even if google doesn't use it, the collective internet applying this kind of metadata makes the web fertile for non-LLM-scraping competitors to provide an alternative option.
Rolling over to google only ensures that they remain dominant, with a high bar for competitors, and driving them to use the same technologies.