Serve markdown to AI agents

AI agents increasingly consume web content, but HTML is noisy: full of navigation, scripts, and styling that gets in the way. By adding the ProvideMarkdownResponse middleware to your routes, you can serve clean markdown versions of your pages without changing your existing controllers or views.

use Spatie\MarkdownResponse\Middleware\ProvideMarkdownResponse;

Route::middleware(ProvideMarkdownResponse::class)->group(function () {
    Route::get('/about', [PageController::class, 'show']);
    Route::get('/posts/{post}', [PostController::class, 'show']);
});

The middleware detects markdown requests through three mechanisms:

1. URL suffix: if the URL ends in .md, the suffix is stripped and the request is routed normally. For example, /about.md becomes /about.
2. Accept header: if the request includes Accept: text/markdown, the middleware swaps it to text/html so the app responds normally, then converts the output.
3. User agent: if the request comes from a known AI bot (like GPTBot or ClaudeBot), the middleware converts the HTML response to markdown.

Only responses with a 200 status code, a text/html Content-Type, and that are regular Illuminate\Http\Response instances get converted. JSON responses, redirects, error pages, and streamed responses pass through unchanged. This means Inertia.js XHR responses work without any issues: only the initial full-page HTML load gets converted.

##Apply the middleware globally

Instead of applying it per route group, you can add it to all routes:

// bootstrap/app.php

use Spatie\MarkdownResponse\Middleware\ProvideMarkdownResponse;

->withMiddleware(function (Middleware $middleware) {
    $middleware->append(ProvideMarkdownResponse::class);
})

##Use attributes on controllers

You can use PHP attributes to control markdown conversion at the controller or method level.

The #[ProvideMarkdown] attribute will always convert the response to markdown, regardless of the request's Accept header, user agent, or URL suffix:

use Spatie\MarkdownResponse\Attributes\ProvideMarkdown;

class DocumentationController
{
    #[ProvideMarkdown]
    public function show(string $slug)
    {
        return view('docs.show', ['slug' => $slug]);
    }
}

The #[DoNotProvideMarkdown] attribute will never convert the response, even if the request would normally trigger conversion:

use Spatie\MarkdownResponse\Attributes\DoNotProvideMarkdown;

class DashboardController
{
    #[DoNotProvideMarkdown]
    public function index()
    {
        return view('dashboard');
    }
}

Both attributes work on the class level too. Method-level attributes take precedence over class-level attributes:

use Spatie\MarkdownResponse\Attributes\ProvideMarkdown;
use Spatie\MarkdownResponse\Attributes\DoNotProvideMarkdown;

#[ProvideMarkdown]
class PageController
{
    public function about()
    {
        // Will be converted (inherits class attribute)
    }

    #[DoNotProvideMarkdown]
    public function dashboard()
    {
        // Will NOT be converted (method overrides class)
    }
}

##Exclude specific routes

If you apply the middleware globally but want to exclude certain routes without using attributes, you can use the DoNotProvideMarkdownResponse middleware:

use Spatie\MarkdownResponse\Middleware\DoNotProvideMarkdownResponse;

Route::get('/dashboard', [DashboardController::class, 'index'])
    ->middleware(DoNotProvideMarkdownResponse::class);

##Disable the middleware

You can turn off markdown conversion entirely via an environment variable:

MARKDOWN_RESPONSE_ENABLED=false