The GraphQL Standard

About this report

GraphQL is the query language and type system Facebook released in 2015 and moved to the Linux Foundation’s GraphQL Foundation in 2018. Unlike the two specifications published beside it in this series, its adoption needs no probing to establish — because GraphQL is harvested, by introspection, from the provider’s own endpoint.

1,108 providers expose a GraphQL surface and 793 publish a schema that could actually be retrieved, defining 69,521 types, 19,333 inputs, 12,606 enums, 3,152 custom scalars and 4,117 explicit deprecations. By volume it is the second-largest description corpus in this practice after OpenAPI.

And it sits almost entirely outside the toolchain every other standard in this series shares. OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, Arazzo and Overlay are JSON or YAML with a JSON Schema metaschema — which is why Spectral can lint them, validators can check them, Overlays can transform them. GraphQL SDL is a bespoke grammar, so none of that reaches it, and a company running both surfaces governs one and not the other with the same tools.

Also: roughly 28% of GraphQL providers expose a schema that could not be retrieved at all, and only 251 of 793 declare a Subscription type.

What's inside

1. Executive summary — a grammar, not a schema
2. What GraphQL is, and what it is not
3. How this was measured, and why the evidence is stronger here
4. What the corpus contains
5. The metaschema problem
6. The body
7. Conformance
8. Agents, and why the trade-off changed
9. The scoring caveat
10. What would have to be true
11. The investable thesis
12. Where this is going

What you get