Should you have a markdown version of your website? Well, probably, but not for the reason most people are saying.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, let's back up a little bit. Markdown is just a simple way to format a text file. The reason everyone's suddenly talking so much about markdown is because it's the preferred format of AI or large language models.
If you're trying to share information with AI, markdown is the most efficient way to do it.
And so for years now, there have been services that'll take the content of your website and make a markdown version. For each HTML page you have, it'll make a markdown equivalent. It'll show the HTML version to humans and the markdown version to AI.
Cloudflare even recently built this service into their platform. And it makes sense, right? This just makes it easier for the AI to understand the content on your website.
The issue ultimately comes down to trust. The AI has no way to verify that the content on that markdown file is the same as the content on the HTML version. The only way to verify would be to look at both versions.
And of course, that would defeat the point.
Pages on your website are being retrieved using a search engine, and that search engine is ranking pages based on the HTML version. The only way the AI could trust and retrieve the appropriate markdown files if they had a separate index and algorithm for those markdown files. And I actually think something like that is likely to appear in the next few years.
So that's the first reason you should consider having a markdown version of your website. But it's not the most immediate reason. People are starting to realize how valuable it is to have all important information in a markdown version, not so much for being discovered by AI, but for internal use.
Developers are now writing their developer docs in markdown. Even Google, who has been telling us for years, we don't need a markdown version of our website, just rewrote their developer docs in markdown. This is because if you're utilizing AI the right way, it almost never makes sense for a human to read this kind of documentation, or really any documentation.
Your entire knowledge base should be written for AI. And then anytime you need information, you can just get it through the AI. It's way more efficient.
But the real advantage, of course, is now the AI can do work on your behalf with all that context.
So what I think every company should be doing right now is taking all the information on their website and off their website and putting it into structured markdown files. We do this for all of our clients in the first two weeks of our campaign. We structure the documents in a Clyde project we call their brand ambassador, and then essentially every one of our processes runs through that brand ambassador.
And then anytime we get new information on the client, feedback provisions, PDFs, documents, anything, we give it to the brand ambassador and have it update itself. This has been so valuable for our agency and all companies I've heard doing this, that I think it's just gonna become mandatory.
Having a comprehensive knowledge based in structured markdown files for your company is going to be at least as important as having a website. And at that point, once this is the norm, then it makes sense for AI to have a search engine just for markdown files.
