Google's John Mueller says only SEO tools ask his sites for markdown

Search Engine Journal reported on 31 August 2026 that John Mueller, Google's most public search advocate, told a Reddit thread on r/TechSEO that the only crawlers requesting markdown copies of his test pages were SEO tools rather than any of the AI companies the practice is aimed at. The reporting is by Roger Montti and quotes Mueller directly.

The method in question is the one where a publisher serves a plain markdown version of every page at a companion URL, most commonly /page.md next to /page.html, in the hope that AI crawlers will prefer the cleaner text and cite the page more often. Cloudflare has promoted markdown as a common format for AI clients and offers tooling for exactly this pattern.

What Mueller said, in his own words

Mueller wrote, per the Search Engine Journal article: "On my test sites the only crawlers who claim to accept markdown are SEO tools. Ymmv." He added that his server setup does not log the accept header, which is the field that would tell you whether a client is asking for markdown or HTML, and that he would recommend anyone trying this to log the accept header before deciding whether to invest in it. That last point matters, because it is a way to check the claim on your own site rather than take his word or anyone else's.

What was and was not established

The observation comes from one person watching a handful of test sites, so it does not support a claim about the whole web. Mueller says so himself with "ymmv", which is Reddit shorthand for "your mileage may vary", meaning results on other sites may differ. His sites may not be the sites the major AI crawlers are most interested in. Neither he nor Search Engine Journal produces a request log or a per-bot breakdown, so the finding is qualitative rather than a number.

What it does establish, on the sites Mueller was watching, is that the traffic requesting the markdown endpoints was mostly automated SEO auditing rather than AI browsing. That is a real answer to a real question, and the question is one worth checking on your own logs before you go to the trouble of maintaining two versions of every page.

Read your own access log first

Before adding a markdown route to your site, watch the access log for a week and count who actually requests it. Filter on user agent and, if your server logs it, on the accept header. Compare the request volumes against the HTML page. If your log answers the way Mueller's did, the markdown route serves data to auditing tools rather than to the answer engines you were trying to reach, and the cost of keeping two representations of every page in sync is not worth it.

If the log answers the other way, you have the number to justify the work. Either way, the number is the point.

Source

• Google's Mueller Shares Their Experience With Markdown For AI SEO, Roger Montti, Search Engine Journal, 31 August 2026.