Encoded · A brand consultancy & protocol company
Est. 2026 Remote-first BCP v0.1 (draft)

 Now encoding founding brands · BCP v0.1

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

Every AI agent in your stack is making brand decisions. The copy bot. The media platform. The vendor tool. The ChatGPT window your customer is in right now. None of them know who you are. brand.md fixes that.

A file you publish once at yourdomain.com/.well-known/brand.md. Every agent that touches your brand reads it before it acts.

The brand deck rotting on a shared drive is the antagonist of this decade. Your agents can't read it. Your vendors won't. ChatGPT never will.
Open spec · CC BY 4.0 Reference code · MIT Same convention as AGENTS.md
§ 01 · Thesis

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

01.1

Most companies will get this wrong. They'll treat brand as a cost center to automate past. They'll save on headcount and discover, two years in, that their agents are producing copy in a voice that isn't theirs, media buys that miss their positioning, and ChatGPT describing them to customers using words they'd never put in writing.

01.2

The knowledge that makes your brand distinctive 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. That's the value a brand consultancy has always sold. It's also the value agents can't access.

When your marketing team is half agents, your own and your vendors', brand fidelity stops being a guidelines problem. It becomes an infrastructure problem. Every agent in the stack needs a version of that senior strategist's judgment, on call, in a form they can read.

That's what Encoded builds. We encode the tacit work of brand into a file every agent reads before it acts. Authored once. Consumed everywhere. Brand-led. Technically rigorous. Open standard.

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 agency required. 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

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
Free
Precedent
AGENTS.md · 60,000+ repos
robots.txt · sitemap.xml · security.txt

 Position

§ 04 · Manifesto

The brand deck rotting on a shared drive is the antagonist of this decade.

Your agents can't read it. Your vendors won't. ChatGPT never will.

Encode the encoded. The craft your senior marketers already know. Put it into files every agent in the stack reads before it acts. Authored once. Consumed everywhere. Open, portable, yours.

Open protocol. Portable brand.
§ 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.

Encoder, the self-serve tool, is in development. Join the waitlist for early access.

§ 08 · Launch

 Now encoding founding brands

Author your BCP before the category authors it for you.

We're encoding a small cohort of founding brands. Live platform integrations, co-announcement at launch, logo rights, hosting, versioning, and founding-customer status on paid tiers.