Markdown Doesn't Matter in AI Search (Yet)

Markdown is not for AI search. It's for AI agents

At just 0.05% of citations, .md files are virtually absent from AI search results. ChatGPT Search and AI Overviews cite HTML web pages, news articles, forums, and documentation sites, not raw markdown files. The confusion between AI search and AI agents has led to misplaced optimization efforts.

Where markdown does matter is in the rapidly growing world of AI coding agents. We're seeing a huge uptick in documentation and site information being crawled by Claude's bot (powering Claude Code) and OpenAI's bot (powering Codex). These agents don't search the web the way ChatGPT Search does. They fetch specific docs, READMEs, and API references to complete coding tasks. Markdown is simpler, cleaner, costs less parsing time, and keeps the context window clean. This shift is accelerating with new agent-native search engines like Exa, already integrated into tools like OpenCode, that let agents search the web and retrieve URLs on their own. As more AI agents adopt these purpose-built search layers, the gap between consumer-facing AI search and developer-facing AI agent retrieval will only widen.