When an AI agent visits your site to check a price or finish a task for someone, it pays to read the page. That cost is counted in tokens, and a normal HTML page is expensive. Navigation, styling, scripts and structured data all arrive whether the agent needs them or not. The agent either spends its budget getting past that markup or runs out of room and reads only part of the page. Both outcomes are yours to deal with, because they decide whether the agent gets your facts right.
Your surface sets the cost
Most advice about agent token cost is aimed at the people building agents. Cache the prompt, route easy work to a cheaper model. That is real, but it misses the half of the bill that the publisher controls. If your page is heavy, every agent that reads it pays for that weight, on every visit. You cannot tune someone else's model, but you can decide how much your own content costs to read.
The same page, served as clean text
The mechanism is content negotiation. The site keeps serving its normal HTML to browsers, and when an agent asks for the markdown form of a page it gets the same content with the markup stripped out. Nothing is hidden and nothing is duplicated. One URL answers in the format the client asked for.
