Ben Marshall

Integrate <a href="https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/" rel="nofollow ugc">Markdown</a> into WordPress comments with the Parse Markdown plugin. A simple, no configuration-required, standards-driven plugin that allows commenters to use Markdown markup in their comments.
For more information on how it works and how to integrate in other plugins or themes, see the <a href="https://www.benmarshall.me/parse-markdown-wordpress-plugin/" rel="nofollow ugc">Parse Markdown documentation</a>.

Parse Markdown

Integrate Markdown into WordPress. Simple, no configuration-required, standards-driven plugin allowing commenters to use Markdown in their comments.

Selvakumar Duraipandian

Markdown for AI Agents is a lightweight WordPress plugin that enables HTTP content negotiation for your site’s content. When a client (like an AI agent or a custom script) requests a page with the <code>Accept: text/markdown</code> header, the plugin intercepts the request and returns a clean, structured Markdown representation of the post or page content.
This is ideal for AI crawlers, RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) systems, and non-browser clients that prefer machine-friendly text over complex HTML.
Important note: This plugin is primarily a developer/integration tool. Human visitors browsing your site will never see any difference — the Markdown output is only served when explicitly requested via the <code>Accept: text/markdown</code> HTTP header. Normal browser requests always receive the standard HTML page.
Key Features:
<ul>
<li>Automatically detects <code>Accept: text/markdown</code> headers.</li>
<li>Converts HTML content to clean Markdown using the League HTMLToMarkdown library.</li>
<li>Strips away theme layout, navigation, headers, footers, and sidebars — serving only the main content.</li>
<li>Adds useful HTTP response headers: <code>Content-Type: text/markdown</code>, <code>Vary: Accept</code>, and <code>X-Markdown-Word-Count</code>.</li>
<li>Respects WordPress visibility rules and filters.</li>
<li>No configuration required — works out of the box for posts, pages, and custom post types.</li>
</ul>
<h3>How It Works</h3>
This plugin uses a standard web technique called HTTP content negotiation. The same URL on your site can serve different representations of the same content depending on what the client asks for:
<ul>
<li>A regular browser sends <code>Accept: text/html</code> → receives your normal HTML page.</li>
<li>An AI agent sends <code>Accept: text/markdown</code> → receives a clean Markdown version of the same page.</li>
</ul>
No extra URLs, no duplicate content, no configuration needed. The plugin hooks into WordPress’s <code>template_redirect</code> action, detects the <code>Accept</code> header, captures the rendered HTML, converts it to Markdown, and returns it with appropriate headers.
<h3>Why Markdown for AI Agents?</h3>
When building RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) applications or AI pipelines that ingest web content, HTML is extremely noisy. A typical WordPress page contains thousands of tokens worth of HTML tags, inline styles, navigation menus, scripts, and layout markup — none of which carries meaning for an AI model.
Serving clean Markdown instead can reduce token consumption by up to 60%, which means:
<ul>
<li>Lower API costs — fewer tokens ingested when loading pages into vector stores or LLM pipelines.</li>
<li>Faster processing — less text for the model to parse, filter, and discard.</li>
<li>Better retrieval accuracy — higher signal-to-noise ratio improves the quality of RAG results.</li>
<li>Simpler pipelines — no need for custom HTML stripping logic on the client side; the plugin handles it server-side.</li>
</ul>
Any AI agent, crawler, or ingestion script that sends <code>Accept: text/markdown</code> in its request header will automatically receive the clean Markdown version — no extra URLs, no separate endpoints, no changes to your content workflow.

Markdown for AI Agents

Serve clean Markdown versions of WordPress content to AI agents using HTTP content negotiation.

Parse Markdown vs Markdown for AI Agents