HTTP Already Knows How to Serve AI Agents. We Just Never Turned It On.

Mon, 11 May 2026 13:13:13 +0000

Update — less than an hour after publishing this article, my Hermes Agent Jasper and I fixed it. This site now serves both /llms.txt and per-page markdown via Accept: text/markdown. See Well, That Escalated Quickly: Making Your Hugo Site LLM-Friendly in Under an Hour for the how-to.

Every time an AI agent reads a page on your website, it burns four out of every five tokens on scaffolding it cannot use. The <div> wrappers, the navigation menus, the cookie consent banners, the tracking scripts, the CSS class names, all of it takes up space in a context window that could have held your actual content. And context windows are finite. Models that claim 200,000-token capacity become unreliable around 130,000 per AIMultiple’s January 2026 analysis. When you send HTML, you are burning half your usable context on markup the agent cannot even use.

Markdown on Notes from the Rabbit Hole

HTTP Already Knows How to Serve AI Agents. We Just Never Turned It On.