Serve agents markdown

AI assistants read your pages to answer someone's question. With your edge install, Punchline can hand them a clean markdown version of each page instead of the full HTML, so they read your pricing and docs quickly and quote them correctly. This is acting at the edge: improving what agents get, not just counting them.

Same facts, different format

• The markdown is made from the page's own HTML response, the same one people get. Nothing is removed for agents only or reworded: the page's main content is converted, and site chrome (navigation, footer, scripts) is left out. Nothing is added either, unless you turn on share links: then one line, a link to the same page, ends the markdown.
• Search engines always get your HTML. Googlebot, Bingbot and the like are never served markdown, so nothing changes for search.
• People always get your HTML, which then carries a Link header pointing to the markdown version.

Who gets markdown

Request	Gets markdown
AI assistants fetching for someone right now, and AI search (ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, Claude-User, Claude-SearchBot, Perplexity, Mistral, DuckAssist and others)	Yes
AI training crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Amazonbot, CCBot and others)	Only if you choose Also AI training crawlers
Anyone asking with Accept: text/markdown	Yes
Anyone adding .md to a URL (/pricing.md, /index.md for the home page)	Yes
Search engines and people	Never

Paths you exclude (like /app or /checkout) are never converted. Only successful HTML pages are converted; anything else passes through unchanged, and so does any page over 2 MB.

Share links

Turn on End each page with a share link and markdown for assistants fetching for someone right now (ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, Perplexity-User, MistralAI-User) ends with one line:

---

Share link to this page: https://example.com/pricing?pl_ho=Q7mZp2KxW9aBc4DeF6gHj8Lk

It's a handoff link your edge install makes for you, with no code: when the person the assistant is helping opens it, their visit is connected to the agent's, and if they go on to complete a goal, the handoff counts as converted. You'll find these under AI & agents → Handoffs as kind page.

• A link, not an instruction. The line states that a link exists, like a share button. It never asks the agent to do anything, and the rest of the page is unchanged.
• Only live assistants. AI search indexes, training crawlers, people and search engines never get one, so links don't end up in an index for strangers to reuse.
• Nothing about anyone. Each response gets a fresh random token, no query string is carried over, and the response isn't cached. Only the token's SHA-256 is stored, and only for verified or declared agents.
• What to expect. In our tests, assistants usually pass on the page's plain address rather than the share link, since they already know it (Claude: 0 of 15 trials). Share links still show which agent fetched which page; for a handoff the person reliably gets, make one for the action itself, like a saved quote or a held demo (Handoff links for B2B).
• Business plan, like handoff links.
• Leave action pages out. Add paths that do something when opened (like /checkout or /book/hold) to Never convert, so their responses aren't converted and don't get a share link.

Turn it on

1. Install with the Cloudflare Worker or the Next.js package. The browser snippet can't change responses.
2. In Site settings → Serve AI agents markdown, tick the box, choose which agents, and list any paths to leave alone.

Edge installs pick up the setting within five minutes.

On Next.js, the proxy answers a markdown request by fetching the page's HTML from your own deployment and converting it. That inner request carries a header derived from your PUNCHLINE_DSN secret, so it's neither counted again nor converted again.

See what was served

AI & agents → Agent content → Served as markdown shows how many agent reads got markdown, which agents, and how many got a 200. Each one is also an ordinary page view, labelled and counted like any other.