Google changes how it parses double-escaped JSON-LD entities

Google has changed how it extracts JSON-LD data, bringing it more in line with JSON and other web standards. As Google Search Central announced on LinkedIn, Google will only do a single pass of HTML unescaping.

What developers should know

If developers are using JSON-LD for structured data, it’s time to update your code. Instead of relying on double-escaped entities, switch to standard JSON escapes or Unicode hexadecimal escapes.

Since Google’s parser now only unescapes once, any code that depended on double-unescaping won’t work the way it used to.

Google Search Central posted about this on LinkedIn:

“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. 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).”