Roger Montti at Search Engine Journal asked what happens when a site serves markdown so machines do not have to chew through a heavy page. John Mueller’s answer, from his own test sites, was blunt.
“On my test sites the only crawlers who claim to accept markdown are SEO tools. Ymmv.”
— John Mueller, quoted by Roger Montti in Search Engine Journal
Mueller also said the servers he uses do not even log the Accept header unless you set that up on purpose. If you care whether anyone asked for markdown, he said, log it first and look at the numbers.
What that actually settles
A stripped file can be easier for a parser to read. That is not the same as a crawler asking for it. On Mueller’s tests, the visitors claiming markdown were SEO tools. That is a measurement note. It is not a ranking method.
Answer engines already read ordinary pages. They also guess. Guessing is the part that hurts a local firm: the wrong phone, the wrong owner, the wrong city.
What a business should publish instead
Publish the facts in one place the owner controls, and keep a second public file that does not change when a plugin updates. AI Verified is that second file. The badge on the website points at it. The clean version is for the tools that want text, not a theme.
That is still not a promise that ChatGPT will put the firm first. Nobody can sell that promise cleanly. The job is to stop the guess, then measure whether the file gets read.
Read the source: Google’s Mueller Shares Their Experience With Markdown For AI SEO (Roger Montti, Search Engine Journal).