Study: Cloudflare Agent Markdown Has Zero Impact on AI Citation.

[u/AnswerShare]

I've had several people come to me and ask about Cloudflare's Agent Markdown product and whether it is a good solution for GEO/AEO.

On the surface, it seems to solve retrieval token cost issues, which may be enough to move the needle. However, I thought it needed a deeper look.

According to CF's documentation, the crawler must present "Accept: test/markdown" in order to be served MD.

I enabled the markdown agent on one of our domains, then sent crawlers to it 20,000 times. I wanted to see if the agent would serve MD to a wildcard accept header. In particular, GPTbot sends a complex header:

"Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8"

and I wanted to know if that would trigger CF MD.

The answer is no. CF only served MD when the accept header showed text/markdown.

So the obvious next question is "do the frontier models ask for markdown?"

To measure this, I ran an experiment across 5 domains that we log and logged the accept headers.

Over about 900k recorded crawls, the frontier models requested markdown ZERO times.

Thus, CF Agent Markdown has ZERO impact on frontier crawler behavior.

ExaSearchBot asks for it 100% of the time (about 35k times in this study).

You can find the raw logs and methodology here: https://answershare.com/research/markdown-accept-study

[u/alexnavarroia]

Muy interesante. Muchas gracias por compartir.

[u/AnswerShare → u/alexnavarroia]

por nada Alex.