In June, Google Cloud published the Open Knowledge Format — a spec for packaging what your company knows as plain markdown files AI agents can read directly. Six weeks later, v0.2 landed. It added almost nothing to the format. It added trust: provenance, freshness, verification, attestation.
That's the tell. The scarce resource in AI search was never content. It's content a machine has reasons to believe.
We're not reading tea leaves from the outside. Growth Orbit has shipped an OKF bundle at growthorbit.com/okf since July 9 — 234 concepts as of this post, rebuilt from our own glossary, insights, and white papers on every deploy. Two weeks later, v0.2 changed what we'd shipped. Here's the field report.
What v0.2 says out loud
One concept per file, YAML frontmatter, type the only required field, no SDK, no runtime — that part didn't change. What v0.2 added: sources (where a concept comes from), generated and verified (who produced it, who confirmed it), stale_after (when to stop believing it), status (draft, stable, deprecated), and an Attested Computation type where a named executor and attester stand behind a number.
One correction to the coverage you'll read elsewhere: Google has published nothing connecting OKF to Search ranking or crawling. Nothing in the spec or its repo mentions Search at all. Our read — it's a bet on agents that read files, not a ranking tactic. Treat any claim otherwise as unsourced.
What running one teaches you
Generation is the cheap part. Our entire bundle is produced by a 78-line build script. If your content already lives in files with real metadata, you're an afternoon away from v0.1.
The version gap is real but mechanical. Our bundle emits timestamp; v0.2 renamed it generated.at and moved citations into sources. Upgrading the script is an hour of work. We know exactly what it costs because we have to do it.
The trust fields are the actual work. sources and generated we can emit from data we already carry — real publication dates, named authors, canonical URLs. But verified can't be emitted by a script. It's a claim that a person checked a concept against its sources, and it's only worth anything if that's true. The spec's hardest field is an org-chart question, not an engineering question.
That's also why this is defensible. Anyone can generate a bundle. Maintaining one whose trust fields are true is governance — verification as a first-class event, completion is not acceptance. The same discipline that runs a revenue system runs a knowledge base.
The loop closed today
This morning we published a glossary definition of OKF. At the next build, it flowed into our bundle as a concept file — the definition of the format, described by the format. Publish once: humans read the page, agents read the file, and every claim carries its provenance.
Your content is an asset or it's exhaust. Build the asset. →