Google’s crawler now strictly enforces standard JSON formatting when reading your site’s structured data, schema markup, instead of auto-correcting double-escaped HTML text. “To bring our parser up to JSON and other standards, we changed our JSON-LD extraction and are now only applying a single pass of HTML unescaping,” Google posted on LinkedIn.
Gary Illyes from Google added, “If you’re wondering what *proper* escaping is in JSON, I have good news for you! It’s very, very well defined in RFC 8259, specifically section 7.”
Google uses JSON-LD scripts (script type=”application/ld+json”) to understand entity details, like product prices, review stars, recipe ingredients, and FAQs, and turn them into Rich Results on Google Search pages.
Google added, “Practically speaking, this means that double-escaped entities (like & or ✔) will no longer be unrolled. If you’re using JSON-LD for structured data, be sure to update your code to standard JSON escapes or Unicode hexadecimal escapes (like \u0026).”
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.
