Make your Joomla site AI-ready for the agent-driven world - without any configuration
AI agents, Large Language Models (LLMs), and crawlers like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overview are visiting your site right now. They're wading through navigation menus, sidebars, cookie notices, and ads to find your actual content — wasting tokens on markup that has nothing to do with what you wrote. System - Markdown automatically serves clean, pure Markdown to AI agents and LLMs while your human visitors see your normal site. Install it once and never think about it again.
Overview
Proof
Cloudflare just launched a paid service that does this. System - Markdown does it better and it's free:
| Feature | Cloudflare | System - Markdown |
|---|---|---|
| Content quality | Entire page (menus, ads, etc.) | Content only (clean) |
| Discovery method | Proprietary headers | RFC 8288 standard |
| Cost | Paid service | Free forever |
| Configuration | Required | Zero - inherits your content settings |
It's running on this site, you can view this page as markdown.
How it works
When an AI agent or LLM requests Markdown — either via the ?tmpl=markdown parameter or via the RFC 9110 Accept: text/markdown HTTP header — the plugin uses Joomla's component template to strip away menus, modules, sidebars, ads, and footers first. Then it converts only your actual content to clean Markdown.
The AI gets exactly what it needs: your article, your categories, your tags, and your custom fields — translated into clean, AI-friendly text. No wasted tokens on navigation. No configuration on your part. The plugin inherits all of your existing content settings. It just works.
Install like any Joomla plugin: upload, enable, done. Most people are running in under 2 minutes. Yes. The plugin works across every page of your Joomla site — articles, category listings, tag pages, and any page where Joomla renders content through the component template. Your categories, tags, and custom fields are included in the clean Markdown output that AI agents receive. Any AI agent or Large Language Model that requests content negotiation via the RFC 9110 Accept: text/markdown header, or that follows RFC 8288 Link headers for alternate content discovery. This includes crawlers used by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overview, and others. The tag on every page also allows any bot to discover the Markdown version programmatically. The X-Markdown-Tokens header tells an LLM how many tokens your clean content will consume before it commits to reading it. This is a meaningful efficiency signal in an agent-driven world where token budgets matter — no other Joomla Markdown plugin passes this header. No. Conversion only happens when specifically requested via ?tmpl=markdown. Regular visitors see your normal site with zero performance impact. The plugin only adds link headers and responds to Markdown requests. It doesn't touch your normal page rendering. Disable it anytime with one click. No! System - Markdown only delivers clean Markdown when an AI agent requests it directly, just like serving a different layout for phones. No bot tricks means no risk to your rankings.Frequently Asked Questions:
Is this hard to install?
Does this work with Joomla categories, tags, and custom fields?
Which AI agents and LLMs does this support?
What is the X-Markdown-Tokens header and why does it matter?
Will this slow down my site?
What if something breaks?
Will this get my site penalized by search engines for cloaking?
Features
- Works for every page - articles, categories, tags, custom fields, third-party components. Not just articles.
- Zero configuration - No settings page, no options, nothing to fiddle with
- Smart content extraction - strips all UI decoration before conversion; AI agents get clean text only
- Token-efficient - passes the
X-Markdown-Tokensheader so LLMs know exactly how many tokens your content requires before consuming it - Standards compliant - Uses RFC 8288 Link headers for AI discovery and RFC 9110 Accept headers for content negotiation
- Built-in caching - Fast delivery without reconverting every request
- Invisible to human visitors - your site looks and performs exactly as before
- Optional schema.org JSON - include your structured data graph in the Markdown output
- Absolute URLs - all relative links are automatically converted, so AI agents can follow them correctly
Technical Details
Standards Implementation
- RFC 8288 Link headers for content discovery
- RFC 9110 Accept headers for markdown requests
- Proper canonical URL handling on Markdown pages
<link rel="alternate" type="text/markdown">on normal pagesLink: rel="canonical"headers on Markdown pages
Conversion Process
- Uses League\HTMLToMarkdown library
- Leverages Joomla's component template (
tmpl=component) - Strips decoration before conversion (menus, modules, sidebars, ads)
- Converts only main content component
- Automatically converts relative URLs to absolute URLs
Caching
- Joomla built-in cache system
- Cache group:
plg_system_markdown - MD5 URL-based cache keys
- Respects site cache lifetime settings
Installation
- No system modifications required
- Works with all Joomla templates
