phalkmin

ParseLess serves your WordPress content as clean Markdown to AI crawlers (via User-Agent detection) and on manual <code>?format=md</code> requests. Same URL, same content, none of the theme chrome, navigation, widgets, or page-builder scaffolding that AI bots and CLI tools don’t need.
It also exposes <code>/llms.txt</code> for the emerging AI-indexing standard, so models know where to find your content.
<h4>Who is this for?</h4>
1. Developers using Claude Code, Cursor, Aider, or any CLI that feeds your own site content into an LLM.
If you’ve ever piped a blog post into Claude or ChatGPT for analysis, rewriting, or summarization, you’ve watched it burn through tokens parsing nav menus, footer markup, and CSS classes that have nothing to do with your content. A typical WordPress page measured live: ~19,800 tokens of HTML for ~975 tokens of actual content — a 20x reduction just by stripping the theme. Heavy page-builder sites (Elementor, Divi) routinely hit 100x or more.
That’s the difference between fitting a handful of pages in a context window and fitting dozens.
Just append <code>?format=md</code> to any post URL and pipe it straight into your tool of choice:
<pre><code>curl https://yoursite.com/my-post/?format=md | claude "summarize this"
</code></pre>
2. Site owners getting “high resource usage” warnings from their host because AI bots are hammering the site.
GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, and a dozen others crawl WordPress sites constantly. Each request renders your full theme, runs widget queries, loads page-builder assets, and ships hundreds of KB of HTML per page — most of which the bot discards before extracting the actual text.
ParseLess intercepts these crawls and serves a tiny Markdown payload instead. You keep the AEO/SEO benefit of being indexed by AI search, without paying the server cost of rendering your full theme for every bot hit.
Typical impact on AI bot traffic (measured on real WordPress pages):
<ul>
<li>95%+ less bandwidth per crawled page (typically 15–30x smaller; e.g. a 79 KB page → 4 KB. Heavy page-builder sites see 100x+)</li>
<li>~60–80% fewer database queries per request</li>
<li>~60% lower peak PHP memory per request</li>
<li>~50–80% faster Time To First Byte (measured 54% on a content-heavy page, 67% on a short one)</li>
<li>On a site with 500 posts crawled monthly by major AI bots, that’s roughly gigabytes → tens of megabytes of monthly bandwidth and a fraction of the cumulative PHP execution time</li>
</ul>
Numbers vary by theme and content. Heavier setups (Elementor, Divi, Avada) see the biggest savings; lightweight themes see less dramatic but still meaningful gains. The conversion is cached as a transient, so repeated bot hits cost almost nothing.
<h4>How it works</h4>
<ul>
<li>AI crawlers are detected by User-Agent and served Markdown automatically — no configuration required.</li>
<li>Humans, search engines, and unknown bots receive your normal HTML output. ParseLess never affects what real visitors see.</li>
<li>The <code>?format=md</code> query parameter works on any post URL for manual preview or CLI piping.</li>
<li><code>/llms.txt</code> is published at your site root with a list of available content for AI indexers.</li>
<li>Conversion happens once per post and is cached. Subsequent requests serve a single transient read.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Features</h4>
<ul>
<li>Automatic Markdown for known AI bots (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot, CCBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, Bytespider, Meta-ExternalAgent, cohere-ai, and more)</li>
<li>Manual preview and CLI access via <code>?format=md</code> on any post URL</li>
<li><code>/llms.txt</code> endpoint for AI-indexing standards</li>
<li>Respects noindex flags from Yoast SEO, Rank Math, and Genesis</li>
<li>Skips private, draft, password-protected, and trashed posts</li>
<li>Works with all public post types (configurable)</li>
<li>Optional YAML frontmatter (title, URL, author, date, categories, tags, excerpt)</li>
<li>Transient-based caching with configurable TTL</li>
<li>Settings page at Tools → ParseLess for detection mode, bot list, cache TTL, post types, and llms.txt control</li>
<li>Per-post meta box with Markdown preview and copy-to-clipboard</li>
<li>Extensible via filters: <code>md4ai_bot_list</code>, <code>md4ai_supported_post_types</code>, <code>md4ai_markdown_output</code>, <code>md4ai_cache_ttl</code>, <code>md4ai_should_serve_markdown</code></li>
</ul>
<h3>Privacy and data collection</h3>
When logging is enabled (off by default), ParseLess records the following for 
each Markdown request:
<ul>
<li>Post ID, URL, and request timestamp</li>
<li>The full User-Agent header</li>
<li>A salted SHA-256 hash of the requester’s IP address (the raw IP is never stored)</li>
<li>Matched bot identifier, bytes served, and whether the response came from cache</li>
</ul>
IP hashes cannot be reversed from an email address, so the WordPress privacy 
exporter/eraser tools will report no personal data on demand.
Logs are pruned daily according to the configured retention window 
(7/30/90/365 days, default 30). Site owners can disable logging or click 
“Delete all logged requests” at any time from Tools → ParseLess.

ParseLess

Serve your posts as Markdown to AI crawlers and CLI tools — typically 95%+ less bandwidth, ~60–80% fewer DB queries, no theme bloat.

Azey

AI agents from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and others read your content to generate answers — but they parse through HTML, JavaScript, and navigation just to reach it. Serve Markdown gives them a direct path: clean Markdown with structured metadata. When a crawler requests it — via an <code>Accept: text/markdown</code> header or a <code>.md</code> URL — your site responds instantly. No noise, no guesswork.
<h4>How It Works</h4>
Serve Markdown adds three capabilities to your WordPress site:
1. Content Negotiation 
When an AI crawler sends <code>Accept: text/markdown</code>, your site returns Markdown instead of HTML — no URL changes needed.
2. .md URL Suffix 
Append <code>.md</code> to any post or page URL (e.g. <code>example.com/my-article.md</code>) to get the Markdown version directly.
3. Markdown Auto-Discovery 
Every page includes a <code><link rel="alternate" type="text/markdown"></code> tag in the HTML head so crawlers can find your Markdown automatically.
<h4>What the Markdown Output Looks Like</h4>
Every Markdown response includes YAML frontmatter with structured metadata followed by your post content. Here is a real example:
<pre>
---
url: 'https://akumarjain.com/textexpander-year-in-review-2025/'
title: TextExpander Year in Review 2025
author:
 name: Ajay
 url: 'https://akumarjain.com/author/akumarjain/'
date: '2026-01-05T09:05:00+05:30'
modified: '2026-01-10T14:30:06+05:30'
type: post
categories:
 - 2025
 - Year in Review
tags:
 - '#ToolsIUse'
 - Productivity
 - Remote Work
image: 'https://akumarjain.com/wp-content/uploads/text-expander-year-in-review-2025.webp'
published: true
---

# TextExpander Year in Review 2025

In my daily work, I need to type the same words and phrases repeatedly...
</pre>
<h4>Features</h4>
Content Serving
<ul>
<li>Content negotiation via <code>Accept: text/markdown</code> header</li>
<li><code>.md</code> URL suffix on any post or page</li>
<li>Auto-discovery <code><link rel="alternate"></code> tag in page head</li>
<li>Each feature can be toggled independently</li>
<li>Choose which post types are exposed (posts, pages, custom post types)</li>
</ul>
Frontmatter and Metadata
<ul>
<li>YAML frontmatter with title, author, date, categories, tags, featured image, and more</li>
<li>Toggle individual metadata fields on or off</li>
<li>Add custom static key-value pairs (e.g., <code>license</code>, <code>language</code>)</li>
<li>Map WordPress custom fields (post meta) into the frontmatter</li>
</ul>
Access Control
<ul>
<li>Per-post opt-out via a sidebar checkbox in the editor</li>
<li>Exclude entire categories from Markdown serving</li>
<li>Exclude entire tags from Markdown serving</li>
<li>Only published posts are served — drafts and private posts are never exposed</li>
</ul>
Crawler Insights
<ul>
<li>Request log showing every Markdown request with timestamp, URL, bot name, and method</li>
<li>Automatic bot detection: ClaudeBot, GPTBot, ChatGPT, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Googlebot, Bingbot, Cohere, Meta AI, Bytespider, Applebot, and more</li>
<li>Stats dashboard: total requests, requests today, unique bots</li>
<li>Filter log by individual bot</li>
<li>Configurable retention period with automatic pruning</li>
<li>One-click log clearing</li>
</ul>
Editor Integration
<ul>
<li>“Preview Markdown” button in the post editor sidebar</li>
<li>“View Markdown” link in the Posts and Pages list table</li>
<li>Meta box shows on all enabled post types</li>
</ul>
<h4>Performance</h4>
Markdown conversion only runs when specifically requested — regular visitors see the same HTML pages they always have. The crawler log uses a lightweight custom table with three safeguards against unbounded growth: time-based retention, a row count cap, and a table size cap.
<h4>Privacy</h4>
The crawler log stores IP addresses and user-agent strings from Markdown requests. This data stays in your WordPress database and is never sent to external services. You can disable logging entirely, configure a retention period, or clear the log at any time from the settings page.

Serve Markdown

Serve Markdown versions of your posts and pages to AI agents and crawlers. Content negotiation, .md URLs, auto-discovery, and crawler logging.

ParseLess vs Serve Markdown