Blog post shrinks from 158KB HTML to 17KB Markdown for AI agents
colinmcnamara · x · 2026-10-13
Developer Colin McNamara measured one of his blog posts: 158 KB as HTML vs 17 KB as Markdown — agents that simply fetch a URL were paying for nav, scripts and styles they didn't need.
His fix:
- Every post now serves plain Markdown via Accept: text/markdown or by adding .md to the URL
- An /llms.txt site map helps agents discover content
- Built following Cloudflare's "Markdown for Agents" convention, implemented natively since the site is on Vercel; one rulebook drives both Vercel and Cloudflare (146/146 redirects matching)
- Key gotcha: use a redirect, not a rewrite — on Vercel a rewrite never sees the prebuilt page
The blog already exposed an A2A agent card and JSON-LD; this covers the agents that just fetch without asking.
Related event: Converting Blog HTML to Markdown Cuts Payload 89% for AI Agents(2 posts)→
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