GLOSSARY · DEFINITION
Open Knowledge Format (OKF)
A Google-published open specification for packaging organizational knowledge as markdown files with YAML frontmatter — one concept per file — so AI agents can read it, and verify it, directly.
The Open Knowledge Format (OKF) is an open, vendor-neutral specification published by Google Cloud in June 2026 for packaging curated knowledge as a directory of markdown files with YAML frontmatter — one concept per file, cross-linked into a knowledge graph. A "bundle" is just a folder: a git repo, a zip, or a path on your website. There is no SDK and no runtime, and the only required frontmatter field is type. A concept can be anything an organization knows — a definition, a metric, a product, a policy, a dataset.
The revealing part is the first revision. OKF v0.2 (July 2026) added almost nothing to the formatting rules — it added trust: sources (where a concept comes from), generated and verified (who produced it and who confirmed it), stale_after (when to stop believing it), status (draft, stable, deprecated), and an Attested Computation concept type in which a named executor and attester stand behind a computed result. Google's first move after shipping the format was to give AI agents reasons to believe what they read. Nothing published so far connects OKF to Google Search ranking or crawling — it is a bet on agents that read files, not a ranking tactic.
Growth Orbit publishes its own OKF bundle at growthorbit.com/okf — 234 concepts generated from this glossary, our insights, and our white papers at every site build. This definition became one of those concepts the moment it was published: the entry about the format is itself described by the format. Maintaining a bundle whose trust fields are true is a governance problem, not a build-script problem — the same discipline as governed revenue, applied to what your company publishes.