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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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.
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.