# Unified schema (/docs/schema)

One Post shape, one Author shape, one Comment shape, the same across every SocialCrawl platform. Field-level guarantees, per-platform availability, and machine-readable JSON Schema.

Most social-data APIs hand you raw upstream JSON, shaped differently on every platform. SocialCrawl normalizes each response into one canonical shape per archetype. A TikTok post and a YouTube video come back as the same `Post`; a Twitter profile and an Instagram profile come back as the same `Author`. Parse it once, read every platform.

Each page below documents a canonical shape: every field, its type, whether it can be null, which platforms populate it, and a machine-readable JSON Schema you can validate against.

## Archetypes

- [Post](/docs/schema/post.md): the unified post shape.
- [Author](/docs/schema/author.md): the unified author or creator profile shape.
- [Comment](/docs/schema/comment.md): the unified comment shape.
- [Product](/docs/schema/product.md): the unified product shape.
- [Review](/docs/schema/review.md): the unified review shape.
- [Seller](/docs/schema/seller.md): the unified seller offer shape.
- [Place](/docs/schema/place.md): the unified place or business shape.
- [App](/docs/schema/app.md): the unified app-store listing shape.
- [Quote](/docs/schema/quote.md): the unified financial quote shape.
- [Job](/docs/schema/job.md): the unified job posting shape.
- [News article](/docs/schema/news-article.md): the unified news article shape.
- [Web page](/docs/schema/web-page.md): the unified web page shape.
- [Transcript](/docs/schema/transcript.md): the unified video or audio transcript shape.
- [Media list](/docs/schema/media-list.md): the unified media-file list shape.

## Cross-platform reference

- [Field equivalence](/docs/schema/field-equivalence.md): how each platform's raw metric names map to the unified fields (e.g. TikTok `play_count` = YouTube `viewCount` = `engagement.views`).

## Machine-readable schemas

Every archetype ships a JSON Schema (2020-12) at a stable URL, e.g. [`/schemas/post.json`](/schemas/post.json). Validate responses in code, or hand the URL to an agent so it can parse correctly on the first try.