Markdown Response

Checks whether your site can return Markdown to an agent instead of rendered HTML — either by honoring Accept: text/markdown (content negotiation) on the homepage, or by exposing a .md variant (e.g. /index.md). AI agents and answer engines parse clean Markdown far more reliably than a full HTML document, so a Markdown representation is an emerging agent-experience signal alongside llms.txt.

What it checks

The audit probes your domain root once per crawl (next to robots.txt / llms.txt), so the check itself does no extra network requests. It reports two signals:

• Content negotiation — the homepage is requested with Accept: text/markdown; the rule passes the signal if the response Content-Type is text/markdown.
• .md variant — /index.md is probed; the signal counts when it returns a Markdown content type.

If either signal is present, the site “serves Markdown for agents”. Neither is required — this is purely informational.

Solution

Give agents a Markdown representation of your key pages:

• Content negotiation: when a request carries Accept: text/markdown, return the Markdown source instead of HTML.
• .md variant: publish a .md version at a predictable path (e.g. /index.md, /about.md).

GET / HTTP/1.1
Accept: text/markdown

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/markdown; charset=utf-8

# Example Co
Short Markdown representation of the page…

Enable / Disable

Disable this rule

[rules]
disable = ["ax/markdown-response"]

Disable all Agent Experience rules

[rules]
disable = ["ax/*"]

Enable only this rule

[rules]
enable = ["ax/markdown-response"]
disable = ["*"]