# Markdown for AI agents: .md page versions and Accept: text/markdown

> How to serve AI agents Markdown instead of HTML: .md page versions, the Accept: text/markdown header, Vary: Accept, link rel=alternate. How to check with curl.

Источник: https://pachca.com/en/agent-ready/guide/markdown

About 80% of a page's HTML is menus, scripts and markup. A Markdown version of the same page is several times shorter, so the agent spends its context on meaning, not boilerplate.

## Why it matters

- Claude Code and Cursor ask for Markdown themselves with Accept: text/markdown. In Evil Martians' logs, Claude Code made 94% of Markdown requests to their site.
- A Markdown version at the same URL is not cloaking: same content, different format, and Vary: Accept tells caches so.
- In our score, Markdown via Accept and .md page versions together weigh 12 out of 100 — more than llms.txt.

## What to do

1.  1

    ### .md page versions

    Every page gets a twin ending in .md: /prices → /prices.md, the homepage → /index.md. Generate them from the same source as the HTML, or the texts will drift apart.

2.  2

    ### Respond to Accept

    For a request with Accept: text/markdown, the same URL returns Markdown with Content-Type: text/markdown and Vary: Accept. Compare q-values instead of matching a substring.

    ```
    curl -sD - -o /dev/null -H "Accept: text/markdown" https://example.com/ | grep -iE "content-type|vary"
    ```

3.  3

    ### Say where the Markdown is

    A link in <head> for DOM parsers and a Link header for HTTP clients:

    ```
    <link rel="alternate" type="text/markdown" href="/prices.md">
    Link: </prices.md>; rel="alternate"; type="text/markdown"
    ```

## What the scanner checks

- The site points agents to its machine-readable files

    Links in the response header or page code lead to llms.txt, a Markdown version or an API description.

- The site serves Markdown when an agent asks

    An agent can ask for a page in Markdown instead of HTML and spend far less of its budget on markup.

- Pages have Markdown versions

    The same page at a URL ending in .md: clean text with no menus or scripts.

- The Markdown version has a header with page data

    Title, description and URL at the top of the file. An agent learns what the document is without parsing the text.

- Pricing is available in Markdown

    An agent comparing products reads pricing most easily from a plain text file.

Check your own site

Paste the address and get the same breakdown in half a minute.

[Check a site →](https://pachca.com/en/agent-ready)

## Sources

- [Evil Martians: .md routes and content negotiation](https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/how-to-make-your-website-visible-to-llms)
- [acceptmarkdown.com — checker and server recipes](https://acceptmarkdown.com/)
- [Cloudflare: Markdown for Agents](https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/reference/markdown-for-agents/)

## Other guides

- [An agent can open your site: no CAPTCHA, no JavaScript wall, an honest 404](https://pachca.com/en/agent-ready/guide/site-access)
- [robots.txt for AI: YandexAdditional, GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Content-Signal](https://pachca.com/en/agent-ready/guide/robots-txt)
- [llms.txt and llms-full.txt: what they are and whether you need them](https://pachca.com/en/agent-ready/guide/llms-txt)
- [sitemap, metadata and JSON-LD: how an agent learns who you are](https://pachca.com/en/agent-ready/guide/structured-data)
- [API and MCP for agents: OpenAPI, MCP Server Card, OAuth discovery](https://pachca.com/en/agent-ready/guide/api-mcp)