Markdown for AI Agents vs Website LLMs.txt

Markdown for AI Agents is a lightweight WordPress plugin that enables HTTP content negotiation for your site’s content. When a client (like an AI agent or a custom script) requests a page with the Accept: text/markdown header, the plugin intercepts the request and returns a clean, structured Markdown representation of the post or page content. This is ideal for AI crawlers, RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) systems, and non-browser clients that prefer machine-friendly text over complex HTML. Important note: This plugin is primarily a developer/integration tool. Human visitors browsing your site will never see any difference — the Markdown output is only served when explicitly requested via the Accept: text/markdown HTTP header. Normal browser requests always receive the standard HTML page. Key Features: Automatically detects Accept: text/markdown headers. Converts HTML content to clean Markdown using the League HTMLToMarkdown library. Strips away theme layout, navigation, headers, footers, and sidebars — serving only the main content. Adds useful HTTP response headers: Content-Type: text/markdown, Vary: Accept, and X-Markdown-Word-Count. Respects WordPress visibility rules and filters. No configuration required — works out of the box for posts, pages, and custom post types. How It Works This plugin uses a standard web technique called HTTP content negotiation. The same URL on your site can serve different representations of the same content depending on what the client asks for: A regular browser sends Accept: text/html → receives your normal HTML page. An AI agent sends Accept: text/markdown → receives a clean Markdown version of the same page. No extra URLs, no duplicate content, no configuration needed. The plugin hooks into WordPress’s template_redirect action, detects the Accept header, captures the rendered HTML, converts it to Markdown, and returns it with appropriate headers. Why Markdown for AI Agents? When building RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) applications or AI pipelines that ingest web content, HTML is extremely noisy. A typical WordPress page contains thousands of tokens worth of HTML tags, inline styles, navigation menus, scripts, and layout markup — none of which carries meaning for an AI model. Serving clean Markdown instead can reduce token consumption by up to 60%, which means: Lower API costs — fewer tokens ingested when loading pages into vector stores or LLM pipelines. Faster processing — less text for the model to parse, filter, and discard. Better retrieval accuracy — higher signal-to-noise ratio improves the quality of RAG results. Simpler pipelines — no need for custom HTML stripping logic on the client side; the plugin handles it server-side. Any AI agent, crawler, or ingestion script that sends Accept: text/markdown in its request header will automatically receive the clean Markdown version — no extra URLs, no separate endpoints, no changes to your content workflow.

Website LLMs.txt generates and manages an llms.txt file, a structured, AI-ready index that helps large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity understand your site’s most important content. How llms.txt works Traditional sitemaps and robots files guide search engines. But as AI-driven systems such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity increasingly ingest web content, they benefit from a clear, structured list of a site’s most important URLs. llms.txt offers that: a plain-text or Markdown list of essential public URLs, optionally annotated with titles, descriptions, and grouping, designed for AI consumption rather than general web crawling. Key benefits ✅ AI discovery readiness: future-proof your site for AI indexing and content retrieval. ✅ Fully automatic: the plugin builds and updates your llms.txt file on its own schedule. ✅ SEO plugin integration: works seamlessly with Yoast SEO, Rank Math, SEOPress, and AIOSEO, automatically excluding content marked as noindex or nofollow. ✅ Advanced controls: choose post types, customize file titles or descriptions, attach optional Markdown files, and trigger manual regeneration. ✅ Developer-friendly: includes filters such as llms_generator_get_post_meta_description for description logic, performance tuning, and custom indexing behavior. ✅ WooCommerce & multisite ready: respects product visibility rules and scales easily across large or networked sites. Activation & setup Activate the plugin. Visit Settings → LLMs.txt to configure post types and update frequency (immediate, daily, or weekly). The plugin generates llms.txt (and optionally llms-full.txt) and serves it from your site root. Content updates trigger automatic regeneration. All noindex/nofollow rules from your SEO plugin are respected. Use cases for llms.txt Publishers, SaaS companies, developers, and documentation sites that want to make their content easier for AI systems to interpret. SEO-driven websites testing AI engine optimization tactics. Agencies and site owners preparing for the next phase of AI search and retrieval. The llms.txt experiment & further reading Are AI bots actually reading llms.txt files? Everything we know about llms.txt