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Serve Markdown to Agents at the Gateway, Not the Origin

Request Markdown with Accept: text/markdown and let an enabled gateway convert origin HTML at the edge. Understand cache variation, changed headers, output, and Cloudflare’s limits.
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To serve Markdown to AI agents without adding a Markdown endpoint to every site, have clients request Accept: text/markdown and let an enabled gateway convert the origin’s HTML before returning it. In Cloudflare’s documented implementation, the origin continues to provide HTML; conversion and representation selection happen at the network edge.

How gateway Markdown delivery works

The client makes a regular HTTP request and signals that it prefers Markdown:

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GET /article HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
Accept: text/markdown

With Cloudflare Markdown for Agents enabled for the zone, Cloudflare fetches the HTML from the origin, converts it at the edge, and returns Markdown. Its documented response uses Content-Type: text/markdown; charset=utf-8. The origin remains the source of the content; the gateway supplies the alternate representation. Cloudflare’s feature documentation describes this flow.

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text/markdown is a registered media type, but registration does not perform conversion: RFC 7763 defines the type, while the gateway or another application must generate the representation.

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Why convert at the gateway

Centralizing conversion can spare origin applications and content systems from having to generate and maintain a separate Markdown version. It can also put conversion configuration in one place for eligible traffic. Those are architectural benefits, not guarantees: support depends on the gateway, and individual pages may be unsupported or fail conversion.

Keep HTML and Markdown cache variants separate

A response that changes with the request’s Accept field needs to be distinguishable from the other representation in shared and downstream caches. Cloudflare’s example response includes Vary: Accept; the HTTP semantics standard explains that Vary identifies request fields that influenced response selection. See RFC 9110, Section 12.5.5.

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Cloudflare says it adds Accept to Vary and preserves other Vary dimensions declared by the origin. In any deployment, check that caches distinguish the Markdown response from HTML; otherwise a cache could serve the wrong representation to a client.

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Headers change when the body is converted

Cloudflare documents that it sets the Markdown content type and recalculates Content-Length. It removes headers that describe the original body, including Content-Encoding, Content-Range, Transfer-Encoding, ETag, and Last-Modified. Because those validators describe the original representation, Cloudflare says conditional requests cannot be honored for converted responses.

Cloudflare preserves origin security and cache headers where applicable. Test conditional requests and cache behavior in your own configuration rather than assuming validators for the HTML body remain valid after conversion.

What Cloudflare puts in the Markdown response

Cloudflare’s output may include YAML frontmatter drawn from supported HTML metadata and Markdown converted from the document body. Its preprocessing removes non-content elements such as navigation, headers, footers, scripts, and styles; JSON-LD, when present, is retained as a fenced JSON block. The response can also include x-markdown-tokens and x-original-tokens estimates for context sizing and chunking. These are details of Cloudflare’s implementation, not promises about other converters.

Cloudflare also documents its handling of content signals. An origin-provided Content-Signal value is preserved and treated as authoritative. If the origin supplies none, the feature adds Content-Signal: ai-train=yes, search=yes, ai-input=yes. That default applies to this feature; it is not a universal gateway setting or a replacement for the origin owner’s policy decision.

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Cloudflare availability, limits, and alternatives

Cloudflare’s documentation, last updated July 13, 2026, lists Markdown for Agents at no cost for Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans and SSL for SaaS customers. It converts HTML only, and the origin response cannot exceed 2 MB (2,097,152 bytes). Plan availability and service limits can change, so confirm them in the current documentation before deployment.

The feature can be enabled through AI Crawl Control or configuration rules scoped to subdomains or paths; Cloudflare also documents an API setting. For other document types, its documentation points to Workers AI AI.toMarkdown(). For dynamic pages that need browser rendering, it points to Browser Rendering’s /markdown endpoint.

How much smaller can Markdown be?

Cloudflare reports that its introductory blog post measured 16,180 tokens in HTML and 3,150 after conversion, an 80% reduction. That is a vendor-reported result for one specific page, not a general expectation or a multi-site comparison. Token savings depend on the source page and converter; the reported figure does not establish a general latency or performance gain. See Cloudflare’s announcement.

What to verify before enabling edge conversion

  • Clients can request text/markdown, and the edge returns a Markdown content type when it selects that representation.
  • Caches keep Markdown and HTML variants separate based on Accept.
  • Your pages fit the converter’s supported content types and size limits, and dynamic content is rendered when necessary.
  • Converted-response headers, conditional requests, security and cache controls, and any content-signal policy behave as intended.
  • The output retains the metadata and structured data your agent workflow needs.
  • The feature can be enabled for the required zone, host, or path under your plan.

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