Why write your policies in Markdown?

What Markdown is

A text file, with a handful of conventions for structure: a hash for a heading, a dash for a list item, asterisks for bold, brackets for a link. The file ends in .md. Raw, it reads like a tidy e-mail. Rendered, it is a web page with headings, lists, links and tables.

## Data retention

We keep access logs for **6 months**.

- Support tickets: 2 years
- Invoices: 7 years

See the [subprocessor list](/subprocessors).

Five reasons

None of them is a matter of taste. Each one is something a PDF cannot give you.

1. 1

   You see what changed

   Two versions of a text file can be compared line by line. In Squaretrust, you put version 3 next to version 4 and see the sentence that was removed and the one that replaced it. Two PDFs side by side are two pictures: you read both and hope.

2. 2

   It is what your assistant already writes

   Ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Copilot for a draft policy and the answer comes back in Markdown: headings, lists, bold. Google puts it this way: Markdown is “widely used by Large Language Models (LLMs) to preserve structured content, like tables, headers, and bulleted lists”. What you paste out of the assistant is already the file.

3. 3

   It reads as a page, not as an attachment

   Your trust center renders Markdown as a web page: real headings, links that open, text that reflows on a phone. A PDF on a phone is zoom and drag.

4. 4

   It will still open in twenty years

   Plain text needs no software, no licence and no font. It opens in any editor, on any system, it is small, you can search it, and nothing in it can expire. A document you may still have to produce for a contract signed years ago should not depend on a file format surviving.

5. 5

   Your team can edit it in Google Docs

   Since 5 October 2026, Google Docs opens, edits and shares a .md file as it is, with comments and real-time editing, and Drive previews it rendered. Nobody has to write the syntax by hand or convert anything. The one objection to Markdown in a small company, “we work in Docs”, is gone.

What Google changed in October 2026

Until then, a Markdown file had to be imported into Docs, which, in Google’s own words, “often altered formatting, stripped comments, and fragmented files”. The announcement of 5 October 2026 changes three things:

• Docs opens, edits and shares .md and .markdown files without changing the file type. Comments and real-time editing work as on any Doc.
• Drive shows a rendered preview of the file, with clickable links and formatted tables.
• No setting to enable, for administrators or for users. All Google Workspace customers and personal accounts, rolled out gradually over up to fifteen days from 5 October 2026.

Docs has exported any document as Markdown since July 2024 (File › Download). Together, the two make Docs a Markdown editor for a team that never wants to see the syntax.

When PDF is still the right choice

A document someone else produced and signed stays as they produced it: an ISO certificate, a SOC 2 report, a penetration test report, a signed contract. Converting it would make it yours, and its value is precisely that it is not. Rule of thumb: you wrote it, Markdown; someone else signed it, PDF. Squaretrust takes both, and keeps every version of both.

Getting started

Three steps, no new tool.

1. 1

   Turn your current policy into a text file

   Open it in Google Docs and download it as Markdown (File › Download). Or hand it to your assistant and ask for a faithful conversion, then read the result: a conversion must not reword a single sentence.

2. 2

   Check the five things that carry structure

   Headings, lists, bold, links, and tables if you have any. If they survived, the file is right. Letterhead, columns and page numbers do not survive, and they are not meant to: the trust center gives the document its layout.

3. 3

   Upload it, and keep editing it as text

   Publish the .md file on your trust center. The next time the policy changes, edit the file, publish the new version, and compare it with the previous one before you tell anyone.