Googlebot’s structured-data parser has stopped compensating for double-escaped HTML entities in JSON-LD markup, Google announced on LinkedIn. The crawler previously unrolled repeated escaping automatically. It now applies a single pass of HTML unescaping and expects standard JSON formatting from there. Google’s Gary Illyes pointed to RFC 8259, section 7, as the definitive reference for proper JSON escaping.
The change matters for any content management system or templating layer that encodes special characters twice before output, since an escaped ampersand or checkmark symbol will now pass through unresolved instead of being cleaned up automatically. Google recommends switching to standard JSON escapes or Unicode hexadecimal escapes.
Sites relying on JSON-LD for product pricing, review ratings, recipe data, or FAQ markup should audit that output for double encoding: a parsing failure there can quietly drop eligibility for rich results without producing an obvious error.
Search Engine Roundtable reported the change on August 21, 2026, in an article by Barry Schwartz.
