i've been seeing this too, especially with large e-commerce catalogs. it feels like they are basically treating deep nesting as a
budgeting issue rather than a parsing error. if the
itemListElement
tree gets too heavy, the crawler just gives up on the children to avoid getting stuck in an infinite loop of sub-nodes.
i've started flattening my structures where possible and just using multiple top-level
ListItem
entries linked via url properties instead. it's a pain for maintenance but at least the data actually shows up in rich results.
it is basically forced denormalization for SEO purposes.are u seeing this mostly on mobile user-agent crawls or is it happening across the board?