Let an agent request your static page as Markdown
Ivan Roslov2 min readRevised September 7, 2026. Product details reflect this revision.
Suppose an agent needs to read an installation guide on your static site. The HTML includes the guide, but also the page layout, navigation, scripts, and styles. Those help render the website; they are not all useful to a client extracting the instructions.
Lessly's static hosting can return a Markdown version when the client requests one. A browser can continue reading HTML while an agent asks for the representation it needs.
Ask for Markdown explicitly
The client requests Markdown with the Accept header:
curl -H 'Accept: text/markdown' https://lessly.com/
On a static service with Markdown for agents enabled, the server can return the page as Markdown. The setting is on by default and can be changed without a redeploy.
The response header tells you which representation you actually received. To inspect it, include the response headers in the request output:
curl -i -H 'Accept: text/markdown' https://lessly.com/
Look for Content-Type: text/markdown; charset=utf-8. Do not assume that sending the request header proves the response was Markdown. If conversion fails, the server can return HTML instead.
Check that the useful content survived
A shorter response is useful only if it still contains what the agent needs. For the installation guide, compare the Markdown with the rendered page: are the commands present, are the steps in order, and do the links point to the right destinations?
Conversion removes HTML presentation. It does not prove that the resulting document is a complete or equally clear explanation. Tables, navigation, and content assembled by client-side code deserve particular attention when checking the result.
There is no fixed saving to promise. The difference depends on the page and its markup. Measure the actual responses if their size matters to your workflow, and compare content as well as bytes or tokens.
Choose the representation for your site
If you want to provide your own Markdown, you can place an about/index.md beside about/index.html in the build. That lets you control the text an agent receives for that page instead of relying on automatic conversion.
You can also turn Markdown for agents off in the static service's settings. The static-site guide explains the switch. Normal HTML requests continue to serve the site as HTML.
Start with one page an agent is likely to need. Request its Markdown, check the response type, and read the result. The feature makes another representation available; that check tells you whether it is useful for your content.
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