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Short answer - Yes they are important

its one of the 100s of factors considered, if it makes natural sense go for it, if it doesn't then don't fret and retrofit

They used to be more useful earlier. They used also help with schema(before a Google update). Now, they're only helpful for internal linking and the way a lot of websites are set up, they're not really that important.

In such case why most of the companies are not doing it.

You can skip 90% of all recommendations and get amazing results. SEO shouldn't be treated as a checklist like it is.

You don't know which 10% to follow though 😆

Agreed. 😂 The job of a good SEO is to narrow it down to the top 20% that captures most of what will get you the results. That way you can prioritise your efforts into things that are more likely to be useful.

When you have schema for breadcrumbs, the crawlers get a good sense of the taxonomy of the website which is great in the long run. It’s also one of effortless ways to have interlinking done on your website. It depends on the hierarchy. It makes most sense when you have a chain of connected pages- e-commerce product listings for example. Still there’s no harm in having a good user experience for something simple as a blog too(IMO). :)

I can share one learning from my days at ixigo. Breadcrumbs used to take up some important above the fold space on one of our product page templates. So we kind of time tested the page (sort of an A/B test) => 1 month without breadcrumbs. Our rankings slightly dropped for that page set (we weren't able to isolate that it was only because of that but yeah it was a major change) The hypothesis of the test was based on an article that I had read in SEOFOMO (sorry I am not able to recall it now) Takeaway: Yes, they are important. What you can do is that instead of having them in the top like most companies have it, just shift them to the bottom of the page. 1. You'll free up some space at top of the page to have other elements 2. You'll have them on the page so they serve their function. Shared an example of how Airbnb does it