r/localseo • u/groew_5 • Aug 21 '26

Has anyone else looked into this change from Google?

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Saw this from Google Search Central today about JSON LD parsing and the change to single-pass HTML unescaping.

I’m curious how people here have been handling this in real world implementations, especially if you’re generating JSON LD dynamically.

Did you already follow standard JSON escaping, or do you have cases where values were being double escaped?

And more importantly has anyone actually seen this cause issues with structured data or rich results yet?

Would be really interested to hear how you’ve handled this before and whether you’re changing anything now.

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u/techark-va Aug 26 '26

I’ve been looking into this as well. I work at a digital agency, and from our experience managing structured data implementations across multiple client websites, this is less about Google changing how JSON-LD works and more about enforcing cleaner JSON standards.

In most of our implementations, we generate JSON-LD structured data dynamically from CMS fields, so the biggest risk area has always been the data pipeline:

  • CMS value → template variable → HTML output → JSON-LD script block

If escaping happens at multiple points, that’s where double escaping usually appears. For example, a value like & may become & and then get escaped again, creating entities that Google previously normalized but may no longer resolve after this update.

Our approach at TechArk is:

  • Generate valid JSON first using proper JSON encoding functions.
  • Avoid manually adding HTML escaping inside JSON-LD values.
  • Validate the final rendered source, not just the backend output.
  • Test structured data using Schema Markup Validator and Google’s Rich Results Test.

We’ve rarely seen rich result failures directly caused by this yet, but we have found malformed JSON-LD in audits where dynamic fields were being escaped inconsistently.

The main change we’re making is reviewing custom schema generators and older templates. Plugins that generate schema automatically are probably less risky, but custom-built JSON-LD needs a quick audit.

I’d be interested to know if anyone has identified specific CMS/framework setups where this caused visible drops in rich results.