Some documentation websites recently checked who was visiting them.
The answer was strange. In one month, AI bots made 213 million visits. Real people made 105 million.
Bots were about 66% of all traffic. On those sites, most "readers" are not human anymore.
If your team writes documents, guides, or notes, your audience changed and nobody told you.
Why AI prefers a simple text file
AI pays for every word it reads. Think of it like a taxi meter that runs the whole time.
Now think about a normal web page. It has menus, buttons, ads, cookie popups, and a lot of hidden code. The AI pays to read all of that too, even though none of it is the actual content.
Markdown is different. It is just plain text with a few simple marks for headings and lists. No menus. No hidden code. Only the words that matter.
That makes it about 80 to 90% cheaper for AI to read. Some companies switched their pages to Markdown and cut their costs by up to 10 times.
This is already happening at a large scale. In March 2026, Cloudflare (one of the biggest companies running the internet's plumbing) added a feature that spots an AI bot visiting a website and quietly converts the page into clean Markdown before handing it over.
A text format from 2004 turned out to be what AI wanted all along.
One warning about the hype
You will see a lot of advice right now telling you to add a file called llms.txt to your website so AI can find your content.
Be careful with that one. Only about 10% of sites use it, and in June 2025 Google's John Mueller said plainly that no AI system actually uses it today. Maybe that changes later. For now, writing clear content matters more than adding that file.
So why is nobody happy?
Here is the awkward part.
Around 85% of developers now use AI tools. AI reads Markdown best. So teams are writing more Markdown than ever before.
But actually typing Markdown is still annoying, and it has not improved in twenty years.
You have to remember symbols. Want bold text? Type two stars on each side. Want a table? You type this by hand:
| Name | Price |
|------|-------|
| Pen | $2 |Miss one line and the whole table breaks.
Developers put up with this because they already work in text editors all day. Nobody else will.
Your project manager will not learn table symbols. Neither will your designer, or the support person who actually knows why your refund policy has three exceptions. These are the people with the real knowledge, and the tool locks them out.
So they write in Google Docs instead. Someone copies it over. The formatting breaks. Two versions now exist and they disagree with each other.
Simple rules for writing docs an AI can use
A few of these are just good writing. Others exist because AI cannot guess things the way a person can.
Make your headings say the real thing. AI often grabs one section without reading the rest of the page. A heading called "Configuration" tells it nothing. "How to set the request timeout" tells it everything.
Put facts in tables, not sentences. Prices, limits, error codes, version numbers. When AI pulls out a piece of your page, a table stays readable. A long sentence listing six numbers falls apart.
Write exact names and numbers. Do not write "add your key to settings". Write the exact setting name and the exact value. A human can guess what you meant. AI will invent something that sounds right, and your customer follows the wrong instruction.
One topic per page. If one page covers setup, billing, and troubleshooting all together, AI will pull the wrong third of it.
The real problem is the editor, not the format
Markdown is fine. Writing it is the broken part.
Writing a document should feel normal. Click a button to make text bold. Insert a table from a menu instead of typing symbols. See how it looks while you type.
And underneath, the file should stay clean, simple Markdown that any AI can read.
That is what we built DotMD for. Real formatting buttons on top of plain Markdown files, so the people who know your product can write about it without learning code first.
A few useful things come with that. The same file can become a document, a slide deck, or a spreadsheet, so your plan and its presentation stop living in separate tools. You share it by link and edit together at the same time, so feedback happens in the document instead of a chat thread. AI sits inside the document as a reviewer, suggesting changes you can accept or reject, using your own API key.
Your documents quietly got a second audience this year. You should at least get a decent place to write them.
DotMD launches at the end of August. Join the waitlist.
Sources: Mintlify agent traffic data, Markdown in the AI era, llms.txt adoption and criticism.