Creating separate Markdown-only versions of your website for AI crawlers is unlikely to deliver the results you’re hoping for. You will get far better results by improving your main HTML pages, their structure, and their data signals, rather than trying to serve special bot only content.

The appeal of markdown for AI crawlers

The idea usually starts with good intentions. Some SEOs suggest generating stripped back Markdown versions of pages and serving them only to AI crawlers. The hope is that lighter, token efficient content will be cheaper to ingest and therefore more attractive to large language models when they decide what to cite.

The problem is that this theory does not match how modern crawlers actually work.

What Google says about Markdown for bots

Senior voices at Google have been unusually direct on this topic. John Mueller has described converting pages to Markdown for bots as “a stupid idea”. His reasoning is simple. Modern crawlers can already read normal web pages. They can extract text, follow links, and interpret layout signals without difficulty. They can even understand text embedded in images.

He also raises a more basic issue that often gets ignored. Crawlers are not waiting for secret Markdown files. If you publish arbitrary text files, there is no guarantee they will be recognised as anything meaningful. At best they are treated as unstructured documents. At worst they are ignored or misunderstood, especially if the linking and hierarchy are unclear.

Why stripping HTML structure backfires

By flattening well-structured HTML into Markdown, you remove signals rather than improving them. Navigation, headings, layout, and repeated structural patterns all help machines understand how content fits together. Stripping that away in favour of raw text does not make interpretation easier. It often does the opposite.

Limited proven benefits for AI visibility

There is also limited evidence of clear benefits. Despite confident claims, there is currently no solid evidence that Markdown for bots improves visibility or citation rates in AI generated answers. The platforms that matter have not published guidance saying they prefer Markdown versions of live pages, nor that they reward sites that implement them.

Industry level studies into AI visibility are starting to emerge, and so far they do not support this tactic. Research across hundreds of thousands of domains has found no meaningful relationship between having LLM oriented artefacts and being cited more often in AI results. In practical terms, there is not yet any demonstrated gain from this class of optimisation.

Arguments about saving crawl or ingestion budget are equally speculative. Smaller pages feel intuitively attractive, but none of the major AI platforms have documented any mechanism where page weight directly influences inclusion or citation. Engineering around an undocumented assumption is rarely a good strategy.

Real risks of serving different content to bots

That said, if you try this approach anyway, the risks are real. Serving different content to different user agents moves you closer to cloaking behaviour and makes debugging harder. When something breaks for bots but not humans, diagnosis becomes slow and painful.

Markdown is also a poor substitute for HTML when it comes to internal linking and navigation. If crawlers cannot reliably follow links in your stripped down versions, you may reduce discoverability and weaken your internal graph. Additionally, maintaining parallel versions of content increases both technical and editorial overhead. You now have two experiences to keep in sync, two sets of bugs, and more edge cases to test, all without any clear evidence of a return on investment.

What actually works for AI search optimisation

A better approach is more straightforward and far more effective.

  • Focus on the assets you already have.
  • Make sure your HTML is clean and accessible.
  • Core content should be available server side, not trapped behind heavy client-side rendering, scripts, or interstitials.
  • Use structured data for entities that matter to your business, in formats that search engines and assistants explicitly support.
  • Improve your information architecture so headings, sections, and internal links reflect real hierarchy and intent.

The goal is to reduce noise, not remove structure. Cutting unnecessary widgets, bloated scripts, and duplicated content helps far more than stripping away the semantic scaffolding that explains what your content actually is.

When machine-readable formats actually make sense

There are limited cases where a machine friendly export makes sense, but they look nothing like Markdown for bots on your main URLs. If a partner or platform explicitly asks for an API, a static feed, or a specific data format, then providing one can be sensible. Even then, it should be treated as an auxiliary feed, not a replacement. Your canonical HTML pages should remain the single source of truth for humans and general-purpose crawlers.

The bottom line on AI crawler optimisation

For most organisations, the path to AI visibility remains straightforward:

  • Better content.
  • Clearer structure.
  • Strong technical hygiene.

Special Markdown only pages add complexity without strong evidence that they improve how often, or how well, AI systems surface your brand.

Tired of chasing unproven AI SEO tactics? SALT.agency helps you focus on what actually works. Get in touch to discuss a strategy built on evidence, not hype.