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LLM Markdown exporter

The LLM Markdown exporter produces an optimized CommonMark version of every documentation page alongside the standard HTML output. This is enabled by default — every HTML page gets a corresponding .md file that web servers can serve through content negotiation.

When a request arrives with an Accept: text/markdown header (or appends .md to a URL path), the web server returns the LLM-optimized Markdown instead of HTML. This is how elastic.co/docs serves documentation to AI agents — they receive clean, token-efficient Markdown rather than raw HTML, significantly reducing context window usage.

The exporter generates:

  • Per-page .md files — one for every HTML page, placed alongside it in the output directory. For section/page.html → section/page.md. For section/index.html → section.md (so appending .md to the URL path works naturally).
  • llms.txt — an index file following the llms.txt specification that lists all available pages with titles, descriptions, and URLs.
  • llm.zip — a compressed archive containing llms.txt and all per-page Markdown files for bulk download.

The LLM Markdown is not the raw source — it is a rendered, simplified representation:

  • Substitution variables are resolved to their values
  • MyST directives are simplified to standard Markdown equivalents
  • Code blocks, tables, and list structure are preserved
  • Navigation-only elements (TOC references, page cards) are stripped
  • Applies-to metadata is included as readable frontmatter context

Each exported page includes structured YAML frontmatter with:

---
title: Page title
description: Auto-generated or authored description
url: https://www.elastic.co/docs/path/to/page
products:
  - Elasticsearch
  - Kibana
applies_to:
  - "Elastic Cloud Hosted: Available since 8.0"
---

Content negotiation

Web servers (like the one serving elastic.co/docs) can use the co-located .md files to implement content negotiation:

  • Browser requests → serve HTML as usual
  • Agent requests with Accept: text/markdown → serve the .md file
  • Programmatic requests appending .md to the path → serve the .md file

This gives AI agents and LLMs the documentation content with as few tokens as possible, in a format optimized for their consumption — not simply the raw Markdown source.