How is this different from just updating our brand guidelines doc?

A guidelines doc is written for humans. BCP is written for agents | hierarchical, versioned, queryable, and readable by every LLM, vendor platform, and consumer agent in your stack. Your doc tells one designer how to pick a color. Your BCP tells a thousand agents at once | ChatGPT describing you, your media-buying agent making a call, your creative-gen tool writing copy | what you do and don't stand for. Different artifact for a different job.

Can't I just put my brand guidelines in a PDF and feed that to ChatGPT?

You can, and you should expect it to work poorly. PDFs are unstructured, session-bound, and re-uploaded per chat. Every agent on every platform has to re-parse it, and every conversation starts from zero. BCP is structured markdown at a public URL with a canonical path. Once it's there, every agent can fetch it, cache it, diff it when you update, and act on it without a human in the loop. It's the difference between emailing a style guide and publishing an API.

What happens to my brand if I do nothing?

ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini are already describing your brand right now. They do it from whatever signals are cheapest to reconstruct | a scraped product page, an old press release, a Reddit comment, a competitor's positioning. The gaps get filled by hallucination. Every day without a BCP is a day of someone else authoring your representation. The cost of doing nothing is a slow drift of your brand into whatever the models happen to guess.

Who owns the BCP file | Encoded or us?

You. Every tier produces a Git repo you own, on your GitHub (or any Git host), served from your domain. Encoded doesn't custody your brand data. The spec is CC BY 4.0, the code is MIT. There is no lock-in by design.

How much does Encoded cost?

Three tiers, all available today. Free: fork Encoded's public template and publish your own BCP with no Encoded involvement. $1,500 Expert Session: 90 minutes with a senior strategist who helps you draft your root brand.md and one priority daughter file. $15,000 Encoding Sprint: one week, full seven-file tree, authored and shipped to your domain. For larger multi-brand or enterprise scope, Encoded quotes custom engagements. Forge (the self-serve wizard) is in development and will be free when it ships.

Do my vendor platforms actually read this?

BCP is v0.1, and native integrations with vendor platforms are being built through 2026. Today, BCP works as a system-prompt paste into any LLM, and its boundaries file maps directly to IAB 3.0 and GARM Brand Safety Framework fields that brand-safety platforms already consume. The long-term bet: vendor platforms adopt BCP because reading one structured file beats reconstructing brand intent from account-rep notes. Early vendor conversations are in progress.

What if my brand strategy changes | is this going to be out of date in six months?

BCP is versioned infrastructure, not a static deliverable. Every edit is a Git commit. Every file has a last_updated date and a revision hash. Your agents re-fetch and re-cache on the cadence you set. The problem isn't change | it's drift. The monitoring layer Encoded is building will surface the gap between what your BCP declares and how agents actually describe you.

Do I need engineers to adopt BCP?

Only if you're going fully self-serve and pushing the template to your domain yourself. The Expert Session and Encoding Sprint are both fully done-for-you | Encoded authors the tree, validates it, and ships it to your domain. Non-technical teams can hand the domain over and receive a published BCP. When Forge ships, even the self-serve path will be a wizard, not a repo fork.

Why would a platform adopt BCP instead of building its own brand-input layer?

For the same reason platforms adopted OAuth instead of proprietary login, and Schema.org instead of platform-specific markup: open standards free vendors from doing the onboarding discovery for every new brand, and they signal interoperability to customers. Every brand wants to author its identity once and have every platform consume it. Every platform wants onboarding friction to drop. Open standards are how those two goals meet.

What does a platform need to do to integrate BCP?

At the simplest level: fetch {brand}.{tld}/.well-known/brand.md, parse the markdown and YAML frontmatter, and map BCP fields to your internal schema. Reference integration patterns and validators are shipping as SDK samples. Vendor platforms exploring integration should contact Encoded directly | it's scoped as a joint design conversation.

Who else is adopting BCP?

BCP v0.1 is new. Encoded itself is the reference implementation | Encoded's brand is published at encodedbrands.com/.well-known/brand.md. Early partner brands are being encoded now. Encoded will name adopters publicly once partnerships are live and logos are approved | we don't claim partnerships we haven't signed.

How does BCP fit with IAB Content Taxonomy and GARM Brand Safety Framework?

BCP's boundaries file maps directly to IAB Content Taxonomy 3.0 and GARM Brand Safety Floor and Suitability Framework. Encoded-specific extensions | positive adjacency, voice-level constraints | are namespaced under extensions: so vendor platforms can consume the standard fields cleanly and optionally read the extensions.

Why should I take BCP seriously | what makes this different from a thousand other open standards that die?

Three things. The reference implementation is live and dogfooded (the company selling the spec publishes its own BCP at its own domain). The licensing is real | MIT code, CC BY 4.0 spec | and the code is public on GitHub. And the pattern is proven: AGENTS.md and MCP used the same well-known-path convention and are already seeing real adoption. Standards die when the maintainer doesn't use them, when the license is vague, or when there's no integration path. BCP is trying to fail at none of those.

What's the relationship between BCP, AGENTS.md, MCP, and schema.org?

Same structural pattern | a well-known path, hierarchical markdown or JSON, developer-native tooling. Different domains. AGENTS.md is codebase-level instructions for coding agents. MCP is a protocol for tool and resource use. Schema.org is structured data for search engines. BCP is the brand-identity layer. Together, they form the agent-readable web: what to build, what to do, what you look like.

Can I fork BCP and host my brand's file without using Encoded at all?

Yes. Entirely. Fork the template on GitHub at github.com/Bruiserhq/encodedbrands.com, edit for your brand, publish at your domain. The spec is CC BY 4.0, the reference code is MIT. Encoded doesn't gate access to the standard. Encoded makes money from authoring tools (Forge), consulting (Expert Session, Encoding Sprint), and eventually monitoring | not from gatekeeping the spec.

Encoded: Express and protect your brand in the age of the agent.

§ 01 · Thesis

Brand is more valuable in the agentic age, not less.

01.1

Most companies will get that wrong. They'll treat brand as a cost center to automate past.

01.2

The tested brand knowledge that lives in senior marketers' heads. The judgment calls, the "we don't say it that way," the instinct for what's on-brand at the edge. None of it has a machine-readable home.

Without it, internal agents produce generic output, vendor platforms make decisions with partial information, and third-party consumer agents describe your brand however the model guesses.

The brands that win this cycle will be the ones whose strategy, voice, and judgment are encoded into the system itself. Authored once, read everywhere. That's what Encoded does.

The thought

In the world of agentic marketing, brand fidelity becomes an infrastructure problem, not a guidelines problem.

§ 02 · Three surfaces

One spec. Three consumption surfaces.

Same file. Different agents. Different moments. BCP is designed to be consumed inside the brand, across the vendor stack, and beyond the brand. No rewriting for each audience.

Surface 01: Inside

The brand's own agents.

Copy, creative, media, compliance. Your internal agent stack consumes BCP to preserve senior-strategist judgment at machine scale. Every agent inherits the reflex on the first try.

copywriting creative gen media buying review / approval

Surface 02: Across

Your vendor stack.

Zefr, Canva, Adobe, Meta, The Trade Desk, DSPs, creative-gen tools. Their agents read BCP to make better calls on your behalf. Faster onboarding, sharper classification, fewer brand-safety misses.

Zefr BSP Meta Advantage+ Adobe GenStudio DSP briefs

Surface 03: Beyond

The consumer agents.

ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, agentic storefronts. BCP is the first time you get input into how third-party consumer agents describe your brand. You get input, not control.

ChatGPT Perplexity Gemini agentic commerce

§ 2.5 · Start

Your first brand.md. Today.

Copy the prompt on the right. Paste it into Claude, ChatGPT, Cowork, or any AI you already use. It will interview you for about fifteen minutes, then hand you back a complete BCP tree ready to publish at your domain.

No signup. No account. No Encoded in the loop. Free forever. This is the whole point of an open standard.

Start with the prompt → Read the docs

~15 min · any AI · free forever

BCP Authoring Prompt · preview Copy on /start →

You are helping me author a Brand Context Protocol (BCP) for my brand. A BCP is a set of markdown files that describe my brand in a way AI agents can read...

Your job: interview me for about 15 minutes, then produce a complete BCP tree as seven markdown files I can publish at `mydomain.com/.well-known/brand.md`.

## Interview rules
Go one question at a time. Wait for my answer before asking the next. If my answer is vague, push back gently and ask for specifics.

## What to ask me, in this order

**Part 1 — Identity (5 questions)**
1. What's your brand name, your domain, and one sentence describing what you do?
2. What's the tagline you use publicly?
3. What category or categories do you operate in?
4. Who's your primary audience? Describe them as a specific person...

[... 14 more questions across Voice, Values, Boundaries, Claims, and Representation. Full prompt is ~3,000 words.]

Not technical? The prompt does the work. Show it to your AI of choice — Claude, ChatGPT, Cowork, Gemini, Perplexity — and it walks you through it.

§ 03 · The protocol

A file tree, not a blob.

Root declares. Daughters deliver. Agents resolve lazily.

A flat brand blob forces every agent to load everything to use anything. It's wasteful, and output quality degrades as attention dilutes. BCP is hierarchical: a lightweight brand.md at the root, daughters for voice, values, boundaries, claims, representation, audiences.

A media-buying agent pulls boundaries and claims. A copy agent pulls voice and audience. A creative-gen agent pulls visual and voice. Your brand shows up to each with exactly the context that task requires. Nothing more.

The file lives in a Git repo you own. We didn't build our own version control. GitHub handles versioning, diffs, history, access, and webhooks at enterprise grade, for free. We don't rebuild what already exists.

→ See Encoded's own BCP, live

encodedbrands.com/.well-known/ BCP v0.1

brand.md                          # always loaded · <3KB
brand/
├── voice.md                    # tone, register, prefer/avoid
├── values.md                   # priority-ordered, observable
├── boundaries.md               # IAB 3.0 + GARM aligned
├── claims.md                   # legal-reviewed, evidenced
├── representation.md           # for consumer agents
├── visual.md                   # typography · color · imagery
├── audiences/
│   ├── brand-leaders.md        # the buyer
│   ├── platform-partners.md    # the distribution
│   └── developers.md           # the protocol community
├── products/                  # per-SKU positioning
└── campaigns/                 # with sunset dates

Ring

Ring 01 · Git repo

Ring 02 · .well-known path

What it is

Brand owns its BCP in Git. Public by default.

Agents find brand.md at {domain}/.well-known/brand.md

Who runs it

You, on GitHub or any Git host

You, via GitHub Pages, or our CDN proxy

Cost

Free

Precedent

AGENTS.md · 60,000+ repos

robots.txt · sitemap.xml · security.txt

§ 05 · Dogfood

We ship our own brand as BCP.

Reference implementation

Our brand is a repo you can fork.

A brand consultancy that can't encode its own brand into BCP has a credibility problem. So we ship ours in public, in Git, at encodedbrands.com/.well-known/brand.md. It is the reference template every brand forks.

Whatever patterns, structure, voice, and decisions we bake in will propagate across thousands of forks. We're writing the DNA of the standard, in public, with our own name on it.

License: CC BY 4.0 (spec) · MIT (code) Version: 0.1.0 Last updated: 2026-04-18

Fork the template → Read SPEC.md

encoded / .well-known / brand / voice.md raw

---parent: /.well-known/brand.mdfile_type: voicelast_updated: 2026-04-17---# VoiceEncoded sounds like a senior brand strategist who hasstopped needing to prove anything and started needingto build something. Confident in the work, impatientwith noise, kind to the reader.## Preferprefer:  - brand (as a noun, a verb, an object)  - encode, encoded, encoding  - agentic  # not "AI-powered"  - fidelity, living, ship## Avoidavoid:  - AI-powered, AI-driven, AI-native   # empty signifiers  - revolutionize, game-changing, disrupt # hype  - synergy, leverage, ecosystem         # corporate  - empower, unlock, supercharge          # sludge## Do“The spec is open. The paid products are how wefund the work.”## Don't“We believe in the power of open standards combinedwith proprietary innovation to drive value at scale.”

§ 06 · Encode

The spec is open. The work is priced.

Three ways in

Fork it, work with us for 90 minutes, or have us deliver a full BCP tree in a week.

Every path produces the same artifact: a versioned Git repo you own, published at your own domain, ready for every agent in your stack to read. Pricing from free to $15,000.

See all three tiers → Start an Encoding Sprint Book an Expert Session

Forge, the self-serve wizard, is in development. Join the waitlist for early access.

Express & protect
your brand in
the age of the agent.