We started serving `markdown` pages to `LLM` engines and search engines on April 3, shares https://www.linkedin.com/posts/glen-mcmurry-growth-marketing-expert_we-started-serving-markdown-formatted-pages-activity-7450991481831526400-3E-F/ Glen McMurray.
We tested one subfolder and controlled as many variables as possible.
We simply reformatted https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/reference/markdown-for-agents/ pages into structured `Markdown` and submitted them to well-known AI bots.
- Visibility in `AIO` increased by +34%
- Organic traffic on the test pages resulted in +4.5% clicks (the rest of the site showed -1.1% during the same period)
- 122 keywords rose from zero presence in `AIO` to obtaining a ranking URL
- The section with the biggest growth shot up from nearly zero visibility to almost `8x` in `AIO`
The performance of the rest of the site remained stable, and the overall number of `AIO` responses for our keywords changed little.
The sample size is still small, but the early signal is very clear.
Insights
— The strategy with `markdown` endpoints introduces uncertainty with content duplication: Google’s stated rules prohibit duplication between `HTML` and `markdown` versions; implementers debate whether to block `.md` paths in `robots.txt` or if the format differences are sufficient to separate endpoints. Verification of crawling is required — after rollout, it is recommended to check server logs to see how the crawler navigates `markdown` pages.
