Viewing in Markdown

Add .md to the end of any published article's URL to get the article in Markdown. Markdown is much smaller than the full web page, which makes it the best format for AI tools and large language models. For example:

This works for published and unlisted articles. Your robots.txt asks search engines not to index the .md versions, so they don't compete with your articles in search results. To get every article in one Markdown file, use /llms-full.txt; see Using LLMS.txt.

Link Tags for Discoverability

Every published article includes a link tag in its <head> that points to its Markdown version, so tools can discover it. For example, this article's HTML contains:

JSON-LD for discoverability

The article's JSON-LD structured data also points to the Markdown version, in its encoding property.

For example, this article's HTML contains:

Comment in the article body

HelpGuides uses semantic HTML to help search engines and AI crawlers understand your content. The <article> element also contains a comment that tells AI crawlers where to find the Markdown version:

Plain HTML version

Add .html instead to get just the article's title and content as HTML, without your site's header, menu or footer. See Feeds and Machine-Readable Formats for this and your site's other feeds.