Hello and happy Friday! Here is a question worth sitting with: when someone asks an AI tool about a business like yours, where does that answer actually come from? Because that is where the game is being played now. The majority of searches today are running through AI, and the answer an AI gives about your company is only as good as the information it can find and understand.

Watch the full video above to learn more.

This week, Daniel Burns, our COO here at Boulder SEO Marketing, walked through and discussed something Google released in June 2026 called the Open Knowledge Format, or OKF. It is brand new, and we are going to be honest with you about where it stands. It is not a ranking factor. It is not a product you buy. It is a simple, free way to organize your company’s knowledge so AI can read it cleanly. And while Google has not confirmed it is using OKF yet, we think it is worth your attention right now. Here is why.

Why showing up in AI answers is the whole game now

One of the things we focus on most at BSM is ensuring the businesses we work with show up in AI search results. That is the name of the game. When people search today, more and more of them never see ten blue links. They see a synthesized answer, and either your business is part of that answer or it is invisible. There is not much middle ground anymore.

So a big part of our job is building processes that keep every website we touch as optimized as possible for AI search. OKF is one more thing we are putting on the radar because we believe it will matter. Maybe not next week. But the direction is clear, and we would rather be early than scramble to catch up later.

The reason this fits so naturally into what we already do is simple. Everything in AI optimization keeps circling back to the same question: how clearly can you explain what your company is all about? Schema does a version of it. LLMs.txt does a version of it. The way you format and answer frequently asked questions does so. OKF is just another way to answer that same question, this time in a format built specifically for machines to read.

What OKF actually is

Let us strip away the jargon. OKF is essentially a folder of plain text files. Each file talks about one specific thing. A process. A metric. A definition. One file links to another, and that one links to another, until you have what amounts to a small wiki about your company, written specifically about your company.

It is simple on purpose. That is the whole point. AI agents are trying to do one thing when they look at your business: understand what you do and how you do it, using as few resources as possible. A clean, labeled folder of linked files gives them exactly that. No guessing. No piecing together fragments from ten different places. They open the folder, follow the links, and come away with a clear picture of how everything connects.

There is a reason it uses plain text. Plain text is universal. It does not depend on a specific platform, a login, or a particular piece of software. Anything that can read a file can read it, which is exactly what you want when you have no idea which AI tool is going to come looking next year.

Think about where your company’s real knowledge lives right now. Some of it is on your website. But a lot of it is buried in docs, drives, and spreadsheets. Some of it lives only in people’s heads. Some of it is scattered across other websites you do not even control. How your business runs, what your terms are, how you define the things that matter in your work, what you are actually about: that information is real, and it matters, but most of it has never been organized in a way a machine can read. It is just sitting there, locked up in places AI cannot reach. That is the gap OKF is built to close. It gives that internal knowledge a structure, so it stops being invisible.

Website content and company knowledge are two different jobs

Here is a distinction that trips people up, so it is worth slowing down on. OKF is for your internal company knowledge. It is not your website content.

Your website content is handled elsewhere, and we handle it carefully: clear pages, one idea per page, well-labeled, well-defined, and kept current. Tools like LLMs.txt help describe and organize that on-site content for AI. That work does not go away, and it should not. It is still where a huge amount of your visibility comes from.

OKF sits alongside it. It captures the company knowledge that does not naturally live on a marketing page, the structured explanation of how your business actually functions behind the scenes. Think of it as the difference between the storefront and the operating manual. One is what the public sees. The other is how the whole thing actually works. AI benefits from both. When you combine the two- the website content optimized for AI and the company knowledge organized in a readable structure- you give AI and Google a genuinely full picture of who you are.

That fuller picture feeds directly into something we talk about constantly: E-E-A-T. When your knowledge is clearly organized, Google can present you as a resource with real experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Vague, scattered information does the opposite. It leaves AI to guess, and guessing rarely works in your favor. The clearer you are about who you are and how you operate, the easier it is for a search engine to trust you enough to put you in front of someone.

And here is the strategic part most people miss. The businesses that win in AI search are not always the biggest or the loudest. They are the ones that are easiest to understand. If an AI can quickly and confidently figure out what you do, who you serve, and why you are credible, it will reach for you. If it cannot, it moves on to a competitor who made that job easier. Clarity is becoming a competitive advantage, and OKF is one more lever you can pull to get there.

Why this looks familiar if you have been paying attention

If you have followed our Friday tips, OKF should feel like a continuation, not a surprise. We have talked about LLMs.txt. We have talked about schema. We have talked about how frequently asked questions should be formatted and optimized. They all come down to the same principle. Structure your information so machines do not have to guess.

That is the throughline in everything we do. Clean, structured, labeled content with current information. It is what we recommend on the front end and the back end of every site we work on, and it is exactly the foundation OKF is built around. So when we saw OKF, our reaction was not “here is something new to learn from scratch.” It was “this is what we have been doing all along, now with a name and a format attached to it.” If you are already doing the fundamentals well, OKF is not a leap. It is a short step.

We see this pattern over and over when we audit a site. The information is usually somewhere there. It is just scattered, inconsistent, or written for a human who already knows the context. OKF forces a useful kind of discipline: say one clear thing per file, define it properly, and connect it to the rest. That discipline helps machines, and frankly it helps your own team too.

Is it worth acting on yet? Here is our honest take

Let us be straight about where OKF stands, because we are not going to oversell it to you. Some SEOs believe this format could feed AI agents directly one day. Not yet. Google has not confirmed it is using OKF. So is it worth banking your entire strategy on today? Probably not. It is a little ahead of the curve, and we will tell you that plainly rather than dress it up.

But is it worth watching, and worth starting on? We think so. Look at LLMs.txt as the model here. That is something being used today, which is why we are already implementing it across our AI optimization work. OKF feels like it is on a similar path, a proactive bet that is likely to pay off. And the cost of getting ahead of it is low because the work involved is the kind you should be doing anyway, with or without Google’s stamp on it.

So here is our position, plainly. Do not wait for OKF to become official. Start organizing this information now. Start documenting how your business runs, your processes, your definitions, your terms, in a clean and structured way. If and when OKF becomes something that genuinely separates well-optimized businesses from everyone else, you will already be ahead of the pack. And even if it never becomes a formal ranking signal, you will have done something valuable regardless: you will have organized your company knowledge in a way that helps your own internal AI tools work better today. That is the part we love about this. It positions you for tomorrow while paying off right now. There is no real downside.

What to do next

You do not need to overhaul everything this week. Start small and start honestly. Look at where your most important company knowledge lives, and ask a simple question: could a machine actually find and understand this? If the answer is no, that is your starting point.

Organize one process. Define your key metrics in plain language. Write down the things that currently only live in someone’s head and would walk out the door if that person left. Keep each piece clear, labeled, and up to date. Then link the pieces together so they form something a machine can navigate, just as you would explain your business to a sharp new hire on their first day. That alone puts you ahead of most businesses, OKF or not, because most businesses have never done this at all.

If you want help building this the right way, this is exactly the kind of AI search readiness work we do every day at BSM. We can audit where your knowledge stands today and build the processes to get it AI-ready, so you are prepared for whatever the next format turns out to be. Reach out anytime. We are here to support you, and we are always happy to talk it through.

We hope this tip helps you get ready for what AI search is becoming.

Have an amazing Friday and a great weekend.

Stay safe and healthy,

Cheers,

The Boulder SEO Marketing Team