This Media Briefing covers the latest in media trends for Digiday+ members and is distributed over email every Thursday at 10 a.m. ET. More from the series →This week’s Media Briefing unpacks the rise of markdown as an AI optimization strategy for publishers, and why not everyone is convinced it’s necessary.
For years, publishing meant optimizing for Google. That’s shifting to optimizing for AI. Some publishers — such as Time — think the fix is as simple as markdown pages.
So much so that they’re creating markdown versions of their websites, a simplified format that strips away page elements like visuals and JavaScript to make it easier for AI systems and bots to understand. The thinking behind this is these pages can improve the likelihood that AI systems accurately process — and, potentially, more likely cite — their content.
But not everyone is convinced markdown is necessary to do that. AI bots can already interpret standard webpages, skeptics argue. The debate also highlights a broader question facing publishers: is better visibility in AI worth making their content even easier for bots to scrape?
“In the short term, having a markdown copy of a webpage makes sense, in theory. But I don’t think it’s a great long-term solution. In the publishing world, we saw this with Google Accelerated Mobile Pages,” said Leigh McKenzie, director of online visibility at analytics firm Semrush. “Nobody’s doing that anymore. The web just kind of caught up.”
