crawlers

Structured Data & AI Crawlers in 2026: Why Most Schema Hype Is Misplaced

From hands-on experiments in late 2025 and early 2026, one pattern emerges clearly: most AI crawlers do not parse JSON-LD semantically. They tokenize the entire page as ordinary text. Search engines still use schema during indexing, but when their LLMs generate answers, they draw from algorithmic summaries and grounding snippets, not raw structured data feeds. The result? Visible, semantically clear HTML structure beats hidden schema for AI extraction in almost every case.