Google’s John Mueller and Martin Splitt suggested caution about using markdown as a solution for optimizing for AI search, saying that it needlessly complicates something that is essentially simple.
Markdown Is A Poor User Experience
The first point that Google’s Martin Splitt touched on is that markdown by itself may not be a good user experience. He referenced that HTML layouts offer the opportunity to create positive user experiences with visually pleasing layouts and colors, something that markdown does not support.
Martin explained:
“And I mean, the other thing is also for users, you can’t just publish a set of Markdown documents because A, we like colors and images and stuff to kind of like flow in a nice layout and Markdown by definition, unless you put a layout on it, doesn’t. And Markdown doesn’t support layouts directly.
So you would have to have some sort of mechanism to… You’re basically recreating the browser. You’re recreating HTML parsing in the end. So might as well use HTML parsing because as you say, that has been around, that has been tried and tested for decades at this point.”
Markdown Creates Twice The Work
The other point Martin made was that using markdown for LLMs while also creating a separate HTML version for users doubles the amount of work and complicates the act of web publishing, which is the opposite of what SEOs and publishers should be doing: simplifying the act of web publishing.
Martin continued:
“The other thing is you would duplicate things if you were to acknowledge, like, users don’t want Markdown. They want the full-fledged website. And then I create a version just for LLMs, then you’re kind of making twice the work or having twice the work, no?”
John Mueller agreed and expanded on the topic by saying that he understood where people are coming from in terms of simplifying the process of publishing content because some HTML pages can actually be poorly presented.
Mueller added:
“Yeah, I think that’s always terrible on the web. And I understand where these ideas come from in that a lot of web pages are just terrible from a structural point of view and hard to use. And it’s tempting to say, well, users can see this complex, weird page, and automated systems, they should have it easy. You should just give them the information that they’re looking for.”
Something that they didn’t mention but is implied in what they were talking about is that humans evolved to primarily prioritize visual information; it’s the dominant way humans perceive the world.
According to scientists:
“…half of the human brain is devoted directly or indirectly to vision…”
That means communicating with images and attractive layouts can be beneficial for getting a message across.
Parallel Versions Of Content
Lastly, both Mueller and Splitt cautioned against having parallel versions of content because it needlessly complicates the act of publishing. Moreover, because an AI won’t email you…
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