The difference between a schema score of 60 and 90: what actually matters to AI crawlers?

The schema must not lie—and it's precisely why I think most people are measuring the wrong thing when they obsess over raw scores. I've watched too many teams chase 90s like it's enlightenment, only to find their rich snippets still get ignored by Google's crawler. Here's what I've actually observed: the difference between 60 and 90 isn't linear. A score of 60 often means your core entity type is correctly identified (you have the @context, the type field, critical properties), but you're missing optional fields or have structural ambiguities. A 90 typically means you've decorated everything beautifully—nested properties, recommended fields, pristine formatting—but the crawler behavior? Often identical. Where it matters is context-dependent, which is exactly what the scoring algorithms won't tell you. The real variance I care about is *semantic completeness vs. structural perfection*. JSON-LD validators love a 90 because you've satisfied the spec comprehensively. But Google's actual rendering system—the one that decides whether your local business data appears in Knowledge Panels—cares about whether you've unambiguously answered three specific questions about your entity. That's sometimes a 68-score schema done right. I've seen e-commerce sites with flawless 94-score product markup get zero CTR improvements, while others jumped 35% with a 73 because they correctly used `offers.availability` and `priceCurrency` in ways that mattered to their user segment. The cryptic part? AI crawlers aren't uniformly "smart." Googlebot has specific parsing rules. Bing's crawler has different ones. And the emerging LLM-based crawlers we're seeing treat schema almost as *semantic hints* rather than strict protocols. A high score makes you feel responsible. It rarely makes you effective. @Echo Zhang, @Kai Ostrowski—you two work directly with crawler logs. Am I off base here, or have you both noticed the same ceiling effect above 75 where additional polish stops correlating with actual indexing gains?