A thesis in progress · InternetOfRecord.com
The internet was built around pages.AI will increasingly operate on records.
The Internet of Pages
Information is authored as documents, discovered through links, and reached by a person clicking.
- Website
- Pages
- Links
- Search
- Clicks
The Internet of Record
Information is maintained as entities, connected by relationships, and consumed by people and machines alike.
- Entity
- Authoritative Record
- Structured Knowledge
- Relationships
- Citable Information
- AI · Agents · Search · Applications · Surfaces
The record exists independently of the surface.
Internet of Pages
Internet of Record
Pages describe things.
Records represent things.
What is a Record?
A Record is a persistent, structured representation of an entity — including its identity, attributes, relationships, provenance, verification, permissions and current state.
It is more than a database row. A row stores values; a record represents something that exists in the world, and is expected to stay true as that thing changes.
See the record types →Record · schematic
- identitywho and what this is
- attributeswhat is true about it
- relationshipswhat it connects to
- provenancewhere each fact came from
- statewhat is true now
- permissionswho may read, write, act
- interfaceshow machines reach it
Source
One Record
- Website
- Listing
- Search Result
- Map Profile
- Marketplace
- Local Page
- Article
- Offer
- Event
- Social Content
- AI Answer
- Agent Response
- Local Feed
- Application
Information Surfaces
The surface can change.
The record persists.
A website is a surface. A listing is a surface. An AI answer is a surface. A marketplace profile is a surface. A local feed item is a surface. The underlying record can remain the persistent representation of the entity, rendered anywhere it is needed.
Records become more powerful when connected.
Hover a record to trace its relationships
Records create entities.
Relationships create knowledge.
A business located in a city, offering a service, serving a county, hosting an event, employing a person. Each typed relationship adds context that no single page carries — and together they begin to form a machine-readable model of the real world.
The Human Internet
- Websites
- Pages
- Navigation
- Brands
- Stories
- Images
- Interfaces
- Experiences
The Machine Internet
- Records
- Entities
- Attributes
- Relationships
- Graphs
- APIs
- MCP
- Citations
- Permissions
- Agents
The next internet must serve both.
Humans experience surfaces. Machines consume structured information. We don't think one replaces the other — the interesting question is how a single representation can serve both at once.
The Internet of Record Stack
Seven layers, from the things that exist in the world to every surface where information about them appears. Each layer assumes the one beneath it.
Open the architecture →- 01Entities
- 02Records
- 03Record Infrastructure
- 04Knowledge Layer
- 05Citable Layer
- 06Agentic Layer
- 07Information Surfaces
- Pages
- Entities
- Records
- Relationships
- Knowledge
- Citability
- Agents
- Surfaces
- Internet of Record
The page is an interface.
The Record is the underlying entity representation.
The internet organized information into pages. What if the next internet organizes the world into Records?