Should You Create Markdown for AI Crawlers? Here’s What the Data Actually Says
Is it worth creating a Markdown version of your pages to help AI crawlers better understand your content?
We recently had this exact conversation with a client of ours. Her CMO had forwarded an article making this case and wanted to know whether the company should invest in building a separate Markdown representation of their site.
For those of you who have managed to avoid this Markdown conversation, here’s what we’re talking about:
The argument is that LLMs have to sift through thousands of lines of HTML (divs, scripts, nested tags, etc.) to get to the actual content on your pages. Markdown strips it back to just the content, headings, and paragraphs, giving LLMs a cleaner version. This is meant to result in quicker comprehension and, therefore, easier surfacing.
Picture sweating foreheads, bleeding fingers, and some kind of obnoxiously loud clock rigged to deduct a coin from the AI crawler’s bank account for every second spent sifting through navigation bars, cookie banners, and tracking scripts.
Poor AI crawlers.
If we’re going by the whole “time is money” logic, the argument is pretty sound. And since anything to do with GEO and AI-driven search still occupies that mysterious space between the known and the unexplored, it’s easy for this idea to spread quickly among marketers who are simply trying to make sense of GEO as it blazes its own trails.
But is it actually worth doing?
In the words of Alan Mansford, our technical SEO sage, “Don’t bother”.
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Now, let’s get into it.
Why the Term ‘Markdown’ Might Be Causing Confusion
The debate about whether it’s worth creating LLM Markdown pages probably stems from people conflating three distinct but similar-sounding concepts:
Markdown-First Authoring:
First of all, if you don’t know what Markdown actually is, it’s a really simplified language that lets you format content as you go without needing to know complex HTML tags.
Some writers use Markdown syntax (shoutout to Obsidian geeks) and plain text for body copy, rather than writing directly in a CMS editor or Google Doc.
This has no bearing whatsoever on what gets published, what users see, or what search engines and AI systems consume.
The moment content is published to a website, it becomes HTML. The drafting format is irrelevant.
Clean Semantic HTML
This is what actually matters for search engines and AI systems: proper heading hierarchy, meaningful structural tags, and well-built templates.
This isn’t headline news. You’re already doing this.
Semantic HTML is handled by your CMS, not by how the content was written or what format it was drafted in. If your site has semantic HTML issues, that’s a technical problem, not a content authoring problem.
Regardless, you should speak to your development team or technical SEO specialist to fix it.
Separate Markdown for AI Crawlers:
This is the HTML/Markdown topic that’s generating the current conversation. The idea is that you publish a parallel version of your pages, with all the HTML scaffolding stripped back, so that AI crawlers can access and parse more easily.
Some tools and articles describe how to embed this HTML-free version within the existing page. Others describe serving it as a separate endpoint.
This is the most technically involved (read painstaking) of the three and the one most often conflated with the other two when the topic comes up in a meeting.
Is There Ever a Case for AI Markdown?
When complex enterprise websites have 2,000 lines of HTML to render a page containing 1,000 words of content, AI Markdown seems appealing. The ratio of scaffolding to substance is significant.
If an LLM is trying to understand what that page is about, simpler input should, in theory, produce better comprehension.
But unless you have a highly complex website (which you likely don’t), the argument loses ground for two reasons:
#1: AI Infrastructure Is Already Capable of Parsing HTML
Sure, we’re at the beginning of the AI epoch, but billions of pounds are pumped into AI infrastructure every year. There’s no way that AI systems are struggling with basic HTML at this point.
That’s like worrying about André the Giant’s knees by asking him to carry your groceries into the house.
The gap between what LLMs can handle and what a Markdown version would provide is not worth the investment for most sites (not including JS-heavy sites with complex architecture).
If AI Doesn’t Understand Your Site, Something Else Is Wrong
The real question is whether your site has an AI comprehension problem in the first place.
If AI trips over your content, it’s usually because of how it’s structured or loaded (JavaScript-only sections, missing headings, chaotic layouts) rather than because basic HTML is “too hard” for modern systems.
For the client that sparked this whole conversation, their site showed no signs of comprehension issues. LLM traffic was arriving from 19 different sources and landing across 185 separate pages.
And these weren’t simply bot visits either. These were conversion-quality sessions from users who had been directed to specific pages by AI systems that had understood the content well enough to recommend it.
If AI doesn’t understand what it’s looking at, it simply won’t send people there. The traffic itself was proof enough that comprehension was not the issue.
In this case, they didn’t need to use AI Markdown because the comprehension problem didn’t exist.
The Industry-Wide Issue This Exposes
The digital marketing world is no stranger to fear-mongering or thoughtless hype. We can’t even count how many times over the last 20 years people have claimed ‘SEO is dead’ whenever Google made a major update or a new marketing channel emerged (voice search, social media, mobile, etc.).
It’s natural for marketing agencies to want to help soothe client concerns by supporting the whole idea of being proactive and taking action…especially when practically everyone on LinkedIn or professional forums is doing it.
On the flip side, if an agency tells a client that their current approach is working and they should stay the course, they can inadvertently appear lazy or out of touch. Optics are everything!
GEO is driving a lot of this mania now. It’s new and complex, and most marketing teams don’t have enough resources or experience with it yet to critically analyse what LinkedIn influencers are telling them.
Unfortunately, it’s easy these days to be convinced that a particular activity is credible and worthwhile. For most brands, this AI Markdown activity (like much of the GEO hype right now) is just not worth your budget or time.
1. Stay focused on the fundamentals that are already generating returns. That means continuing to invest in solid SEO foundations and generating well-structured content.
2. Continue building clean, structured HTML for AI crawlers and humans.
3. Stay curious when monitoring how AI-driven discovery is actually evolving to develop a sense of resilience against claims that certain activities promise faster or better AI results.
How to Know You Have an AI Problem
Without knowing what AI systems actually say about your brand, every GEO conversation is speculative. Geeky Tech has spent the last year building GeekyIQ to solve this problem.
GeekyIQ is an AI brand intelligence platform that analyses your visibility across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity. It shows you where your brand appears across all major LLMs and how you compare with your competitors. Delivering a complete AI workflow, GeekyIQ surfaces the specific content gaps and structural issues that are suppressing your AI visibility.
Before You Invest in Solutions You Don’t Need…
Creating AI-friendly versions of your pages is one of many unfounded GEO recommendations floating around the water cooler these days.
If you’re ever pitched something like this in the future, the first question should always be, what does the data say we actually need? Your second question is, do I have the right data to analyse this?
If you’re not sure how to answer either (or both) of these questions, feel free to reach out to our team or explore Geeky IQ for better AI insights.
