Google Fully Dropping URLs For Breadcrumbs On Desktop Search?

Back in 2015, on mobile, Google went from showing the URL to showing the site name, plus the breadcrumb in the search results. This morning, I have been hit up numerous times about Google doing the same on desktop. It doesn’t seem 100% rolled out yet, so this might be a test or a bug, but it seems Google is showing breadcrumbs, not URLs, on desktop as well now.

This is even when you are not defining this using schema markup – Google will do it anyway, without it.

Brodie Clark posted a bit about this on his site over here and Frank Sandtmann also emailed me about it. Have you noticed this as well?

RankRanger’s feature tracker shows this as well, at over 99%:

BTW HUGE uptick in Breadcrumbs on desktop! (and not on mobile) pic.twitter.com/lSWdGXHl7p

— Mordy Oberstein (@MordyOberstein) August 22, 2019

Here are screen shots (click to enlarge):

So I guess you don’t need the schema anymore?

Forum discussion at Twitter.