Google & Bing: Markdown Files Messy & Causes More Crawl Load

We covered the topic of markdown files before but now we have more commentary from official representatives from Google and Bing on the topic. In short, they call markdown files messy, it can cause issues with finding errors, cause more crawl load and either way, the search engines use what people/humans can see over what bots can see.

As a reminder, a Markdown is a lightweight markup language used to create and edit technical documents using plain text and special characters for formatting. Markdown files are converted into HTML by a Markdown parser, which allows browsers to display the content to readers.

Lily Ray asked about this on social and she got these responses:

What happens when the AI companies (inevitably) encounter spam and attempts at SEO/GEO manipulation in the markdown files targeted to bots?

What happens when the .md files no longer provide an equivalent experience to what users are seeing?

What happens if they continue crawling those pages but actually toss them out before using the content to form a response?

…And we keep conflating “bot crawling activity” with “the bots are using/liking my markdown content?”

How will we know if they’re actually using the .md files or not?

Just thinking out loud…

What happens when the AI companies (inevitably) encounter spam and attempts at SEO/GEO manipulation in the markdown files targeted to bots?

What happens when the .md files no longer provide an equivalent experience to what users are seeing?

What…

— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) February 14, 2026

Here is John Mueller of Google’s response on Bluesky:

The web’s messy on its own; these services all have to filter out things that don’t work. Of course they’ll also filter out things (and sites) that are purposely abusive. Even basic SEO tool metrics like DA do that.

The web’s messy on its own; these services all have to filter out things that don’t work. Of course they’ll also filter out things (and sites) that are purposely abusive. Even basic SEO tool metrics like DA do that.

— John Mueller (@johnmu.com) February 14, 2026 at 2:34 AM

Here is Fabrice Canel of Bing’s response:

Lily. How will you know when .md transform is half-broken on a page? Who will fix? In the AI era we understand webpages perfectly, no need for sub-standard. Think: we rank based on what customers see. As crawlable ajax, anything not real or not well managed by SEOs will die!

💯 Lily. How will you know when .md transform is half-broken on a page? Who will fix? In the AI era we understand webpages perfectly, no need for sub-standard. Think: we rank based on what customers see. As crawlable ajax, anything not real or not well managed by SEOs will die!

— Fabrice Canel (@facan) February 14, 2026

Glenn Gabe quoted it all and said it reminded him of AMP but the big different here, there is no clear rewards with MD files when there was with AMP:

Remember AMP anyone? As Fabrice said, “you really want to double the crawl load?” And I think of my clients with tens of millions of urls on their sites thinking about doing this… Oof. 🙂 https://t.co/etsrBZSY35

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) February 13, 2026

Forum discussion at X.