Google Adds Markdown Files To Help Docs But Not Used For Search

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Barry Schwartz / Executive Editor

Google has added markdown files, .md.txt files, to the Google Search help documents. But John Mueller from Google said that these are not being used for Search or generative AI responses in Search.

For example, any of the pages, such as this one, in the Google Search developer documents, has this drop down to access the markdown file:

John Mueller from Google responded to this on LinkedIn and said, "This is not being done for Search or generative AI responses in Search."

Here is the markdown file for that document, if you cannot access it yourself.

This reminds me of when Google added the LLMS.txt files to their help docs and then removed it and said it does not endorse LLMS.txt.

I guess we will see where this goes but Google is saying, even though Markdown files are available, Google Search does not use it. It could be used for many othe reasons outside of Search.

Forum discussion at LinkedIn.

Update: Google's John Mueller commented more on this in two places:

On LinkedIn he wrote:

In short, this is added by the developer documentation site where we host our content. It's not done for search or for discoverability.

For developers, when it comes to developer content, I think this can make sense, as once they're on the site, they can easily repurpose the markdown version of specific developer documentation that they're looking at in order to help tune an AI answer, or to help an AI coding system. It doesn't help to get your content found, but it can help those who have already found your content, to make the most out of it, if they're using AI systems like that. For the average site, I don't think it makes much sense (but who knows how that might change over time). For example, on a shoe store, having a shoe's "specifications" accessible as markdown is not going to get you any more sales, and nobody is asking an AI system "how do I use this shoe" :-).

On Bluesky, he wrote:

The short answer is that it's not done for search. There's more to websites than just SEO :-).

The longer & nuanced version is that it's worth separating "discovery" (finding the website or pages with a global search engine) vs "functionality" (there's probably a more accurate term for this, but basically: once someone has found the page, helping them to best do the task they want to do).

Perhaps that's similar to CTA's on traditional pages? You don't "do them" for SEO (to be found), but if you're responsible for the website overall, ensuring a high "discovery rate" (SEO) together with a high conversion rate is useful to justify your work.

To get back to the developers.google.com site, AI coding has gotten very popular, and these coding systems can be (I think) efficient and accurate with the code they produce if they can easily read / parse reference material, such as developer documentation.

In those cases, it can help to give them a way to understand the context of the documentation they're looking at, as well as a simplified version of the reference page (eg, in markdown). OF COURSE they can read HTML just fine, so this is imo more of a temporary crutch, perhaps to save some tokens.

For non-developer sites, I don't think this makes much sense, even with more agentic traffic in the future (and if you check your logs, you're not getting a lot of that at the moment). Making a markdown version of a shoe's specs is not going to get you more sales (competitors appreciate it tho).

And (I know, nobody reads this far), if you think this is important to prepare for when agents are everywhere: your site (all sites) have much more important things to do for SEO than to prepare for a potential future situation that may or may not come. Prioritize needs before dreams.

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Google Adds Markdown Files To Help Docs But Not Used For Search

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