Introducing Markdown for Agents

The evolving landscape of online content discovery is shifting from traditional search engines to AI crawlers and agents, necessitating structured data from the predominantly unstructured Web. To accommodate this shift, businesses must treat agents as essential visitors by optimizing content for AI consumption. Markdown has emerged as a preferred format for AI systems due to its efficiency in minimizing token use compared to HTML. Cloudflare's "Markdown for Agents" feature facilitates this transition by enabling real-time conversion of HTML to markdown, allowing AI systems to request and receive markdown content directly from enabled websites. This process reduces computational costs and complexity associated with traditional HTML parsing. The feature includes content signals that indicate permissible uses of converted content, such as AI training and search inputs. As AI systems increasingly browse the Web, Cloudflare Radar now tracks markdown usage to monitor these trends. This feature, available in Beta for Cloudflare's Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans, aims to streamline content delivery for AI agents and invites feedback for further enhancement.