Transcription of organic templates into shapely inorganic materials is generally believed to occur because of charge or hydrogen bonding interactions between the template and the inorganic precursor; the formation of the inorganic material is always promoted by a catalyst present in solution. In this paper, we prove for the first time the existence of a so-called surface mechanism, which allows the transcription process to take place via initiated formation of the inorganic material (here silica) exclusively on the template surface. Further growth of the inorganic material takes place solely on this surface, resulting in an inorganic product containing only templated silica and no granular (i.e., untemplated) product.