Migrating to brief.md from closed brand profiles
Operators migrating from a closed brand profile (Featured, Cision contact card, HubSpot brand kit) to brief.md keep the data but escape vendor lock-in. The migration is mechanical: extract structured fields from the closed system, format as brief.md, publish.
Operators evaluating brief.md want to know how migration works and what they keep / lose vs. their existing closed system.
What migrates cleanly
Identity, positioning, ICP, voice rules, banned phrases, brand assets — the structured fields most closed systems track also have a 1:1 mapping in brief.md. Most operators can extract these via the closed system's export feature (CSV, JSON) and reformat as Markdown frontmatter + body sections in 30-60 minutes per brand.
What does not migrate
Closed-system internal scoring, proprietary algorithms applied to your brand profile, vendor-specific decoration (badges, analytics, integrations) — these stay with the vendor. brief.md does not try to replicate proprietary scoring; the spec's position is that scoring is a consumer concern, not a brief concern. Consumers (AI agents, PRAPI, journalist tools) compute their own scores against the structured brief.
Migration mechanics
Step 1: extract from the closed system (export feature or manual copy). Step 2: write a brief.md in canonical form, scoping each section appropriately. Step 3: publish at /.well-known/brief.md or your custom route. Step 4: cancel the closed-system subscription if the consumer side is replaced (PRAPI handles the consumer side for inbound PR; other tools handle other surfaces). Step 5 (optional): JWS-sign for tamper-resistance.
Reversibility
The brief.md format is plain markdown. If you migrate to brief.md and later want to go back to a closed system, the data is yours — copy out, paste in. The point of the open spec is that the operator owns the data; vendor lock-in is a choice, not a constraint.
StartVest LLC migrated PRAPI's brand context from a Featured.com profile + a Cision contact card to brief.md in 2026-Q1. Both closed-system subscriptions were cancelled after migration; the brief.md now serves both inbound PR (via PRAPI) and AI consumers (Claude, Perplexity) directly.
FAQ
How long does migration take?
Typically 30-60 minutes per brand for a clean extraction-and-reformat. Multi-brand portfolios can run in parallel; operators reporting 8-brand migrations in a single afternoon. The bottleneck is usually the closed system's export feature, not the brief.md authoring.
What if my closed system does not let me export?
Manual copy from the operator-facing UI. Tedious but unavoidable. The brief.md format is human-readable, so manual authoring is feasible — most operators find the process clarifying because it forces structured thinking about positioning that closed systems' free-text fields obscure.
Will my AI consumer recognize a brief.md migrated from a closed system?
Yes — brief.md is brief.md regardless of how it was authored. The spec is content-agnostic; consumers look at the structured frontmatter + scope-tagged sections. A migrated brief and a from-scratch brief are indistinguishable to consumers.
Should I migrate before or after the spec hits 1.0?
Now. Forward compatibility is built into the spec; migrating at 0.1 produces a brief that will work at 1.0 with at most minor field additions. Waiting for 1.0 just delays the value of having a portable brand context.
Run brief.md in PRAPI.
PRAPI is the canonical brief.md implementation. Every brand in your portfolio gets its own brief.md, voice-validated drafts on every pitch, and Git-canonical authoring.
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