Cloudflare’s new real‑time HTML‑to‑Markdown feature lets you serve lightweight Markdown to AI crawlers directly from the edge. By simply adding an Accept: text/markdown header, the network transforms the original HTML on the fly, delivering a concise, token‑friendly version that speeds up inference and cuts costs. It works with eligible paid plans at no extra charge.
How the Edge Conversion Works
When an AI agent requests a page, it includes Accept: text/markdown in the HTTP request. Cloudflare fetches the HTML from your origin, runs a fast conversion engine at the edge, and returns the Markdown payload instead of the full HTML. The process happens in milliseconds, so you don’t need to maintain a separate Markdown endpoint.
Why Token Efficiency Matters
Large language models count every token they ingest, and HTML often contains markup that inflates token counts. Converting to Markdown can shrink a typical article from over 16,000 tokens to around 3,000, an 80% reduction. That translates into lower API fees and faster response times for any service that feeds web content into an LLM.
Key Benefits for Developers and SEOs
- Token efficiency: Reduce token usage and cut per‑call costs.
- Simplified pipelines: No need to build or maintain separate Markdown routes; the edge handles it automatically.
- Analytics insight: Cloudflare Radar now tracks how many requests prefer
text/markdown, giving you visibility into bot behavior. - Potential SEO impact: If search engines start favoring cleaner markup, serving Markdown could influence rankings.
Real‑World Experience
One senior SEO engineer reports that after enabling the feature on a handful of sites, their LLM‑powered summarizer ran at half the token cost without losing relevance. “The edge conversion is seamless—just a single header change on the crawler side,” they said. You’ll notice the lighter payload immediately, and you won’t have to maintain duplicate content.
What to Expect Next
The feature is currently in beta and will roll out to more zones in the coming weeks. Cloudflare is monitoring request volumes and will fine‑tune the conversion engine based on real‑world usage. If adoption climbs, you might see a new standard emerge for how the web talks to AI agents—favoring concise, structured text over bulky HTML.
