AI Knowledge Base

Right now, every serious business is trying to figure out how to incorporate AI into their workflow. The most important part of that is how you structure your company's knowledge.

As of today, June 12, we have the very first standard for how that knowledge should be structured. This is the moment we've been waiting for, and as I guessed, it's Google who's putting forth this standard.

No surprise there. They just put out a blog post announcing what they're calling the Open Knowledge Format, or OKF.

I'm so excited about this. I already recorded a video, and I had to record another one, even though it's 100 degrees outside right now.

If Google is successful in getting businesses to adopt this standard, and I think they will, they've had a lot of success with Universal Commerce Protocol and Web MCP. Getting your company's knowledge base set up using this standard is going to be the most important step for you to take before integrating AI.

If you watch my videos at all, you know how bullish I am on setting up a knowledge base like this for your company...

ocesses in isolation and into a world where we can all share and iterate on each other's processes. This absolutely has to happen for us to make quick progress.

We still don't know yet if Google Standard will be adopted, but I mean, come on, it's Google. There are no real competing standards right now, and it does make sense.

Alright, TJ, just tell us what it is already. First of all, it's just files.

There's no SDK or compression schema that you have to worry about. It's just a series of markdown files in a nested hierarchy.

Within each folder, you can have an optional index file that describes all the other files in that folder, and at the top of each markdown file, there's a mandatory YAML front matter. If that sounds complex at all, trust me, it's not.

It's just some text at the top of each file defining fields like title, description, tags, type, resource, and timestamp. Only a few of these are mandatory.

That just lets the agent quickly look up relevant files, and then you can add as many custom fields as you want...

ing to do ourselves. It's a huge rush to adapt to this standard.

However, it's so close to the best practices that already exist, and it makes so much sense given where AI is headed, that I think you'd be safe adopting it now. And if you haven't already started collecting this knowledge base, I highly recommend you start doing that immediately.

Most website traffic now comes from bots, not humans. Clover just did a study and found that 57.5% of website traffic comes from bots.

Business owners that are keeping up with this realize things are changing. I get emails every day from businesses worried that they're falling behind.

They recognize that we're quickly entering a world where the primary user of your website is an AI agent. They're ready to rebuild their website for this AI world, fully integrate a into their workflow, and take advantage of these trends before their competitors do.

And that's awesome. If you're thinking like that, I think you're in the top 5% of businesses right now.

But here's what I tell them. We can totally speculate about what the web is gonna look like a year from now and start building towards that.

And I do think we're finally getting to the point where we can make some confident guesses about what that'll look like. If you want to take full advantage of this moment, you have to take some risk...

y that makes it trivial for AI to find that information. 3.

You need to be tracking how AI does, research and ultimately recommends a brand when people are searching for the product or service that you sell. Identify the types of pages and articles that AI likes to cite before making that recommendation, and make sure you have more visible versions of those pages on your website.

Take note of all the third party review platforms and directories and discussion forums that AI sites, and make sure your brand has a strong presence there. Not only is this the most effective form of digital marketing right now, there's no sign that any of this will become less important in the foreseeable future.