Does google follow links discovered in JSON-LD?

Question

Lets say I have a site with a page of 20 products which are fed through an API. The products are loaded using infinity scroll so the initial page render has 5 products tops. Upon scrolling it adds 5 then 5 and so on.

JSON-LD is used to pass information to the search engines/crawlers. So instead of creating a JSON-LD of 5 products that the search engine will find its HTML, I create a JSON-LD of 20 products...with links to the products.

code snippet

<script type="application/ld+json">
 {
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Product",
  "description": "Blah blah blah....",
  "name": "A product",
  "image": "/images/product.jpg",
  "offers": {
   "@type": "Offer",
   "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock",
   "price": "20",
   "priceCurrency": "USD"
  },
 "url": "/products/product-name"
}
</script>
.....

Will google follow the links of the products and index? Is it allowed to have a JSON-LD of products for which the crawler cannot find their HTML?

How google says they use JSON-LD from the google developers documentation:

Google uses structured data that it finds on the web to understand the content of the page, as well as to gather information about the web and the world in general. see here

Answer 1

Google will almost certainly find links in JSON/LD and will crawl those pages. Regardless of how Google uses JSON/LD, Googlebot has long had heuristics to find and crawl URLs embedded in JavaScript.

I wouldn't count on Google indexing a page whose only reference is a URL embedded in JSON/LD. It isn't clear if Google passes PageRank in URLs that it finds outside of normal HTML links. In any case, you should create alternate link paths to get to each and every one of your products. I usually suggest linking every product to several other products. That is usually done with a "Related Products" type of section in the product page. Then Googlebot can easily find multiple links into each and every product and will index the most product pages.