Google's Open Knowledge Format Gets Five Trust Signals

What Google Shipped

Google's Open Knowledge Format moved to version 0.2 on July 29, 2026, and the update, reported by Search Engine Journal, adds five fields designed to let a consumer of an OKF bundle answer one question: can I trust this?

The five signals map to five specific questions Google says every OKF consumer needs answered: what was this created from, how much should I trust it, is it still true, is it the current version, and was this number produced the way we said it must be.

• Provenance: a new sources field records where a concept's information came from, whether an external doc, a bundle-relative path, or a scope descriptor.
• Trust: generated and verified fields.
• Freshness: a stale_after field.
• Lifecycle: a status field.
• Attestation: a new concept type called Attested Computation.

Why It Matters for Marketers

The sources field example Google published shows the level of detail expected: entries carry an id, a resource link, a title, an author and a last_modified date, alongside objective signals like usage_count. That's a documentation habit most content teams don't have yet, and it's the same discipline this publication flagged around robots.txt handling and crawl access.

If OKF becomes a real input for how AI systems evaluate and cite structured data, the brands whose martech stacks already track authorship, timestamps and revision status will have a head start. Everyone else will be retrofitting provenance metadata under deadline pressure, the same scramble already playing out around scraping and attribution risk.

This week's move: audit whether your published structured data (schema markup, product feeds, knowledge bases) has clear author attribution, last-modified dates and a defined expiration point. Those are exactly the fields Google is now asking machines to check for.