A Markdown version of your pages. Why bother, and how much work it is

Open any page on your site and save its source to a file. On a typical business site, the text a visitor actually reads is a small part of it. The rest is the menu, the footer, the cookie banner code, analytics scripts, styles and icons.

People don't notice, because the browser lays it all out. An AI model reading the page to answer a question gets the whole bundle and has to fish out what matters. Usually it manages. Sometimes it picks the wrong paragraph, because the footer mentioned prices too.

What it is#

A Markdown version is the same page content as plain text with light formatting: headings, paragraphs, lists, links. No template. For /services/bookkeeping/ it might be /services/bookkeeping.md, or a file in a separate /md/ folder.

The idea took off with the llms.txt proposal: the index file on your home page links to these clean versions rather than to the full pages.

Do assistants actually use it#

Not all of them, and not always. There's no rule today that ChatGPT or Claude look for a .md version first. Some developer tools do use it, while the big assistants don't publish exactly how they read pages.

It's still worth doing, because it costs little and has practically no downside. A .md file doesn't change how your site looks or where it ranks in Google. It does give anyone looking for it the content without the noise. And it shows you whether a page says anything concrete once the visuals are gone. Sometimes it doesn't say much.

Which pages first#

Not all of them. A handful that answer the questions customers ask most often is enough:

• your offer or services, with prices or price ranges,
• an "about" page with a clear sentence on who you are and where you work,
• contact details, directions and hours,
• one or two pages of common questions.

If you have Google Search Console connected, check which pages get the most visits. That's a good order to work in.

Doing it without a developer#

On WordPress the Anole plugin handles it: every published post and page gets a version under /md/. On other sites you can write and publish Markdown versions in Anole's Content Studio. They get an address in Anole and an entry in your llms.txt.

The Anole audit checks each page for a Markdown version in a few usual places, so you can see right away how many pages have one and how many are still waiting.