Google Tightens JSON-LD Extraction with Single Pass Unescaping

Google's crawler has undergone changes to its JSON-LD extraction process. The update now strictly enforces standard JSON formatting, rather than auto-correcting double-escaped HTML text.

This means that Google will no longer unroll double-escaped entities in JSON-LD scripts. Instead, webmasters must ensure their code uses standard JSON escapes or Unicode hexadecimal escapes.

Gary Illyes from Google explained the change by referencing RFC 8259, which defines proper escaping in JSON. The update aims to bring the parser up to date with modern standards and better handle structured data on websites.