Google just lowered the thresholds to get a Search Profile (and expanded to more countries). You now need only this many followers on at least one platform: ▪️YT, Insta, X: 35K ▪️TikTok: 100K If you have a Knowledge Panel you may already have one auto-generated. Otherwise, go make one at Here's what it looks like in Search:

I'm really enjoying using my OKF brain. Had a discussion just now about everything we know on discovered-not currently indexed pages in GSC. The system uses Gemini-3-flash preview to read the markdown files where everything we ingest is sorted into the concepts covered. I had previously ingested Google's documentation, my personal notes on a Google Search Central Event and also an article I wrote. In this case, we had a great Search Off the Record podcast quoted in my article, but there was no link in my brain. So I added the link and my brain asked if we should make a new concept for discovered-currently not indexed. My OKF brain is getting better than me at remembering references that I might want to pull from.

"We have arrived at a pivotal moment in human history. I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand. It’s critical that we collectively get the next steps right to ensure this all goes well for humanity and we usher in an incredible new age of discovery and wonder." - Demis Hassabis, now the Chair of Google DeepMind & Chief Scientist of Alphabet.

I have pondered for years why there is such differing opinion on the need for links when it comes to ranking. There are a lot of people who find it ludicrous to think that you can rank content without links. And yet, the majority of businesses I consult with have had little ROI from link building for many years now and have given up on link building for SEO. Here's why I think both camps are right. Links help Google discover new content. If nobody knows you or recommends you, then you can get into the game by getting links to your site. The anchor text of those links gives Google context on what your site is about. But know that Google is continually learning and improving its understanding of which links are worth considering as a vote for your site. If you're building your own links, there's a good chance that the systems will see patterns consistent with manipulation and just discount them. Now, if you're an established business or well known website, Google already knows who you are, and that you have an audience, and what topics you are known for. Most links won't make much difference here. With that said, if you start getting links and mentions from authoritative places for your topics, this can improve Google's understanding that others consider you as knowledgable on that topic. I don't think this is primarily a PageRank thing - it was in the past - but rather, it adds to the collection of signals that indicate that others see you as a topic expert and that your content is worth showing to people. Those signals are used by Google's deep learning systems that create algorithms to try to predict what users will find helpful and reliable. But, what about the case of my site I shared in this thread? It's a single page with a helpful tool I made with ChatGPT a couple of years ago. I published it anonymously. It had no authority. It went for a couple of years with a smattering of traffic. Google did rank it - most queries were low page one. I think their machine learning systems that try to predict helpfulness could see it had merit and was worthy of showing to users. Over time, the site collected more signals that indicated that people found it helpful, and this helped push the rankings higher. Today it ranks well, often top 3, for many of its top queries. Could links have helped it rank faster? I think the answer to this is yes and no. If I managed to get true buzz and attention, those links likely would help. If I built links in traditional SEO ways (like getting articles published with a link pointing back to my site for example), I likely would have created signals consistent with manipulation for SEO purposes and perhaps could have sabotaged Google's trust in my site. So if you're unknown, yes, earning some links can possibly help get you on Google's radar so your site can start gathering signals to help Google's systems better predict that you could be a good site to show searchers. But if you're already known for your topics, you're already in that auction. What makes you rank higher is a whole variety of signals that Google can use to predict whether your page is among those the user is likely to be satisfied with. Google told us years ago there were over 200 signals they use beyond PageRank - and that was before they had today's current AI infrastructure and computational power. I suspect there are even more now. The answer really, IMO, is to work to truly be the option people will click on and go on to be satisfied with. So my thought on links is that if you're brand new, some links can help. Truly earned links are by far better than ones you can make yourself. And for established sites, the only links that really make a difference are the type that would help your business even if SEO wasn't a thing.

Just built an OKF system with everything I know about building an OKF system and turned it into a chatbot to help others do the same. Antigravity helped me figure out how to deploy it and (hopefully) make it safe. Got a few folks testing it now. I am so very excited about this.

Built a system today with Antigravity that uses Gemini-3-flash-preview to determine what data a user is trying to see, gathers the data needed via the GA4 MCP and then creates an OKF structure to determine how to display it and then saves that for future use. So now I can create a custom dashboard for my clients with just the GA4 info they need - and it is super easy to query and modify. Note: This is the type of use case OKF was designed for. I still think OKF + the LLM Wiki format of storing knowledge as concepts for agents to query is its most killer feature though! Will share more details soon. It's not quite where I want it to be...but we are getting there.

In the last minute of the book "The Infinity Machine", Demis Hassabis says, "We are the engine room of Google now. There are AI overviews in Google Search and a billion people are using them, and that's just scratching the surface. It's literally just the first level of what's coming." 👀 Highly, highly recommended read!

Once again, the Google earnings call was very interesting. I found it fascinating to see that revenues from ads across the Google Network (aka Adsense) were down 1% while Cloud revenues (AI chips, infrastructure and Gemini model use) were up a staggering 87%. It is not hard to see where Google's focus is. I've written a blog post with my thoughts: ​ And here it is in video form:

The Open Knowledge format has been improved. Google just announced OKF v0.2. which introduces a Trust Layer to solve the problem of accountability in agent-generated knowledge. OKF v0.2 aims to answer these 5 questions in the YAML frontmatter: ▪What was this created from? ▪How much should I trust it? ▪Is it still true? ▪Is it the current version? ▪Was this number produced the way we said it must be? Type is still the only required filed in the YAML frontmatter, but you are encouraged to add these new fields. (You don't need to though - your current OKF structure is still going to work.) The new fields are: ▪generated: (Supersedes timestamp) ▪verified: (List of human/machine confirmations) ▪status: (draft, stable, deprecated) ▪stale_after: (Absolute expiration date) ▪sources: (Structured provenance data) I want to share something else as well. I think if you're following how I'm building with OKF, we may be using OKF in a different way than it was intended to be used for. They say they created OKF so agents can have the context they need to understand table schemas, metric definitions and runbooks. Yet, we are using it to help agents understand knowledge. I think what we are doing is more akin to Karpathy's LLM-Wiki (which was the inspiration for OKF). I also think what we are doing is amazing - so continue on! Marie

This is really big news. Google introduced the Open Knowledge Format (OKF) - a standardized way to store information in a directory of markdown files. Makes it really easy to make a digital brain that agents can use. These files can serve as a living wiki. You can give agents the ability to query them or edit them. They can interlink. Seems to me this could replace Notion or Obsidian. I can think of so many uses for this. Google's blog post: An easier to understand explanation is the SPEC.md file: I gave those two links to Antigravity and asked how we could use it for any of the projects we're working on. It came up with so many ideas. I would imagine Claude Fable 5 would whip up some pretty amazing things based on this system. Currently creating an OKF library of our pepper garden. It's going to be a fun weekend.