Test breadcrumb markup against a real route through your site before treating a successful validator result as completion. Check each label, destination and position, then compare that ordered trail with the navigation a reader can use. Valid structured data can still describe an unhelpful or misleading path.

For a documentation site, the useful outcome is a visitor who can move from a specific answer to the right parent guide. Search appearance is a separate observation. Google's current breadcrumb documentation lists desktop availability; a missing breadcrumb on a mobile result is not, by itself, evidence that your implementation failed.

Start with the parent the reader needs

Choose a specific page and ask what a reader would reasonably open next to understand its context. A configuration guide might belong under a task collection, a product guide or an API family.…