# Markdown page variants > Serving clean text-first versions of your key pages for AI crawlers. By Joey Kudish · Reviewed by Marius C. Paun · Published 2026-07-27 · Updated 2026-07-28 Your HTML pages are built for people: navigation, sidebars, scripts, styling. An AI model has to wade through all of it to find the few hundred words that actually answer the question. A Markdown variant hands it the clean version directly. ## What it is A Markdown variant is a stripped-down, text-first copy of a page: the real content, in Markdown, with the nav and chrome removed. Sites that do this report large drops in token size, Cloudflare cites up to around 85% smaller, which means a model spends its limited context on your content instead of your layout. This is a convention, not a formal standard. There is no RFC that says "serve Markdown to AI." There are two established ways to do it, and one underlying piece (HTTP content negotiation) that is standard. ## Why AI engines care Most AI crawlers do not run JavaScript and do not want your styling. A clean Markdown representation is faster to fetch, cheaper to process, and less likely to be misread. It is the same instinct behind [llms.txt](/guides/llms-txt): give the machine the signal without the noise. Real docs sites already do this, Anthropic, Stripe, Cloudflare, and Vercel among them. ## How to set it up **Option A: a parallel `.md` URL.** Serve a Markdown twin at a predictable path, usually the same URL with `.md` appended. Anthropic's docs do exactly this: [docs.claude.com/en/docs/intro.md](https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/intro.md) returns clean Markdown instead of the rendered page. It is simple and easy to link to, including from your `llms.txt`. **Option B: content negotiation on the same URL.** Keep one URL and return Markdown when the request asks for it via the `Accept` header. This is standard HTTP, the same mechanism browsers use to negotiate formats: ```bash # Same URL, Markdown representation, selected by the Accept header. curl https://yourdomain.com/your-page -H "Accept: text/markdown" ``` Cloudflare offers this on its docs and blog: it detects `Accept: text/markdown`, converts the page, and returns Markdown. This option is generally the safer one for search, because you are not publishing the same content at a second crawlable URL. **Advertise it.** Either way, tell agents the variant exists. A discovery hint in your HTML `` works: ```html ``` You can do the same at the HTTP layer with a [Link header](/guides/link-headers). ## Point .md URLs back to the original If you go with separate `.md` URLs (Option A), point them back at the HTML original with a canonical signal. Search engines have long warned against serving materially different content at two separate crawlable URLs, and a canonical link keeps your HTML page as the authoritative one. Content negotiation (Option B) sidesteps that entirely, because there is only ever one URL.