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Cloudflare serves Markdown to agents instead of HTML

Cloudflare turned on page-to-Markdown conversion by the Accept header - how it works, how much it saves and what stays on the site owner’s side

  • markdown
  • cloudflare
  • agents

event ·published · kaktak.net

On February 12, 2026, Cloudflare announced Markdown for Agents. A site behind Cloudflare can serve an agent a Markdown version of a page without changing a line of its own code.

How it works

The agent adds the Accept: text/markdown header to its request. Cloudflare’s network fetches the regular HTML page from the site, converts it to Markdown and returns the result.

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

The response carries the text/markdown type and an x-markdown-tokens header with an estimate of the text size in tokens. A browser does not send that header and gets HTML as before.

At the time of the announcement the feature was in beta and was enabled by the site owner in the dashboard on paid plans.

How much it saves

The announcement gives Cloudflare’s own example: the text of the post takes 16,180 tokens in HTML and 3,150 in Markdown, which is 80% less. This is a measurement of one page made by the author of the feature, not a study.

What it does not change

  • The conversion is automatic. If the HTML has no text because scripts draw it later, the Markdown will not have it either.
  • The agent has to ask for Markdown. Those that do not send the header get HTML.
  • There is no data showing that the feature increases mentions of a site in AI answers.

What a site owner should do

If the site is already behind Cloudflare, the feature can be enabled and checked with one request. If not, a separate .md address or a rel="alternate" link gives the same result. Three ways with examples and checks: Markdown versions of pages.