What is a Reference file?

A Reference file on YAMO is a document a Playbook reads while it works. Your house style, your offer, the list of competitors you watch, the rubric you score against. It is the difference between output that is generically correct and output that knows your business.

Your reference files live together in your Knowledge Vault, which is the container; a Reference file is one item in it.

Three scopes, and who each one belongs to

Where a reference file sits decides who can read it and what it travels with.

• Account references belong to your account. Upload once and any of your Playbooks can point at it. A brand voice document serving everything you own is an account reference.
• Playbook references travel with one Playbook. They are the knowledge layer of that particular method, and they are what a template ships slots for.
• Instance references belong to one customer's Instance. Their files, their data, their context. They never change the Playbook.

A reference named without a path resolves against the Playbook first and the account library second, so a Playbook's own copy of a file wins over an account file with the same name.

Placeholders, and why a template ships them

Copying a template materialises every reference it declares as a placeholder in your copy, and the good templates ship placeholders with real example content rather than an empty file. So target-keywords.md in URL SEO Audit arrives showing you what a keyword list should look like, and your job is to replace the example with yours.

The setup checklist tracks every reference still on placeholder content and clears the item when you replace it. A Playbook will still run with a placeholder in place. It just works from the example knowledge instead of yours, which is rarely what anyone wants.

Keeping them current

A reference is a file, so updating what a Playbook knows is editing a file. The next run reads the new version. There is nothing to retrain and nothing to rebuild: the document is the interface, and the references are its facts.

What to read next

• Reference file for the one-sentence version.
• Reference files for adding, replacing and scoping them.
• What is a Playbook? for the thing that reads them.
• Build for where they are attached.