CDN and cache layers

When you serve both HTML and markdown from the same URL, external cache layers can cause problems. The package includes a Vary: Accept header on markdown responses, but not all CDNs respect it.

##Cloudflare

Cloudflare's Free and Pro plans do not respect the Vary: Accept header for non-image content types. This means the first response (HTML or markdown) gets cached and served to all subsequent requests — regardless of their Accept header.

If you use the .md suffix detection method, this is not an issue: /about and /about.md are different URLs with separate cache entries.

If you rely on Accept header or user agent detection, you need to configure Cloudflare to bypass its cache for markdown requests. Create a Cache Rule with this expression:

any(http.request.headers["accept"][*] contains "text/markdown")

Set the action to Bypass Cache.

For user agent-based detection, add expressions for the bots you want to handle:

any(http.request.headers["accept"][*] contains "text/markdown") or
http.request.headers["user-agent"] contains "GPTBot" or
http.request.headers["user-agent"] contains "ClaudeBot" or
http.request.headers["user-agent"] contains "ChatGPT-User"

##Other CDNs

CDNs like Fastly, Varnish, and Nginx generally respect the Vary: Accept header. Since the package sets this header on markdown responses, these CDNs will store separate cache entries for different Accept header values without additional configuration.

##spatie/laravel-responsecache

If you use spatie/laravel-responsecache, cached HTML responses may be served before this package's middleware runs. The response cache stores the first response it sees (HTML) and replays it for all subsequent requests — including those that should receive markdown.

To fix this, override useCacheNameSuffix() in your CacheProfile to create separate cache entries:

use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use Spatie\ResponseCache\CacheProfiles\CacheAllSuccessfulGetRequests;

class CacheProfile extends CacheAllSuccessfulGetRequests
{
    public function useCacheNameSuffix(Request $request): string
    {
        $suffix = parent::useCacheNameSuffix($request);

        if ($request->attributes->get('markdown-response.suffix')
            || str_contains($request->header('Accept', ''), 'text/markdown')
        ) {
            return $suffix . '-markdown';
        }

        return $suffix;
    }
}

Then register it in config/responsecache.php:

'cache_profile' => App\CacheProfiles\CacheProfile::class,

##General advice

Caching failures are silent — a cached HTML response served to an AI bot is still a valid HTTP response, so no errors are logged. Test your setup end-to-end in production-like environments where all cache layers are active.