Markdown Output

Every production build can publish a .md file alongside each page's index.html. AI crawlers, LLM tools, and programmatic consumers get clean markdown instead of parsing HTML.

How it works

When markdownOutput is enabled in settings/seo.md, the build system writes an index.md file into every page's output directory:

site/
  index.html          ← your homepage
  index.md            ← markdown version
  docs/
    forms/
      index.html      ← HTML page
      index.md        ← markdown version
    deploy/
      index.html
      index.md

Each .md file contains the page title as an H1 heading followed by the raw markdown body — no frontmatter, no layout, no HTML wrapper. The content is identical to what you write in your source files.

Settings

Enable or disable markdown output in settings/seo.md:

---
# Publish .md versions of every page (for AI crawlers and LLM tools)
markdownOutput: true
---

Enabled by default. Set to false to skip .md file generation.

Setting	Default	Description
`markdownOutput`	`true`	Generate `index.md` alongside `index.html` for every page

Markdown output runs during activated builds — the files are written to disk alongside your HTML output.

What gets generated

Three things happen when markdown output is enabled:

Per-page .md files

Every page gets a sibling index.md. Access it by appending /index.md to any page URL:

https://yoursite.com/docs/forms/index.md
https://yoursite.com/blog/my-post/index.md
https://yoursite.com/index.md

llms-full.txt

A single file at /llms-full.txt containing the full markdown content of every page on your site, concatenated with page titles and source URLs. This follows the emerging convention for giving LLMs complete site context in one request.

While /llms.txt is a table of contents with links, /llms-full.txt is the actual content — useful for AI tools that want to ingest your entire site without making multiple requests.

HTML alternate link

Every HTML page includes a <link rel="alternate"> tag pointing to its markdown version:

<link rel="alternate" type="text/markdown" href="https://yoursite.com/docs/forms/index.md">

This helps AI crawlers discover the markdown version from the HTML page.

SEO benefits

Markdown output improves AI discoverability in several ways:

llms.txt links to .md versions — when markdown output is enabled, your /llms.txt file links directly to the .md versions of each page instead of the HTML versions, following the llms.txt spec recommendation to point to LLM-optimized content
llms-full.txt — a single file with your entire site's content, ready for LLM ingestion
<link rel="alternate"> — tells crawlers that a markdown version exists
Clean content — AI models get structured text without HTML noise, navigation, footers, or scripts

Accessing documentation

Markdown output gives AI coding agents access to official sitemd documentation. When an agent needs to know how a feature works, it can fetch the .md version of the relevant doc page from sitemd.cc.

sitemd docs forms           # search docs from the CLI
sitemd docs /docs/deploy    # read a specific doc page

SEO — all SEO features including llms.txt and AI crawler settings
Build Modes — trial vs activated
MCP Server — all MCP tools