System - Markdown
Introduction
AI agents like ChatGPT and Perplexity are crawling your site right now, but they're wading through navigation menus, sidebars, and cookie notices to find your actual content. System - Markdown automatically serves clean, pure content to AI agents while your human visitors see your normal site. Install it once and never think about it again.
Proof
Cloudflare just launched a paid service that does this. System - Markdown does it better and it's free:
Content Quality:
❌ Cloudflare: Converts entire page (menus, ads, sidebars)
✅ System - Markdown: Content only (pure signal, zero noise)
Discovery Method:
❌ Cloudflare: Proprietary headers
✅ System - Markdown: RFC 8288 web standards
Cost:
❌ Cloudflare: Paid service
✅ System - Markdown: Free forever
Configuration:
❌ Cloudflare: Required
✅ System - Markdown: Optionally include JSON schema.
How it works
When an AI agent requests Markdown, the plugin uses Joomla's component template to strip away menus, sidebars, ads, and footers first. Then it converts only your actual content to clean Markdown. The AI gets exactly what it needs - your article - without wasting tokens on your navigation. You set nothing up. It just works. AEO and GEO for free.
Features
- Zero configuration - No settings page, no options, nothing to fiddle with
- Smart content extraction - Only converts actual content, ignores all UI decoration
- Standards compliant - Uses RFC 8288 HTML and HTTP headers for proper discovery
- Built-in caching - Fast delivery without reconverting every request
- Invisible to users - Human visitors never notice it exists
- JSON Schema - Optionally include generated schema graph.
- Passes X-Markdown-Tokens header
- Works for ALL pages of your site, not just articles.
Technical Details
Standards Implementation
- RFC 8288 HTTP and HTML Link headers for content discovery
- Proper canonical URL handling on Markdown pages
- rel="alternate" type="text/markdown" on normal pages
- Link: rel="canonical" headers on Markdown pages
Conversion Process
- Uses LeagueHTMLToMarkdown 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: plgsystemmarkdown
- MD5 URL-based cache keys
- Respects site cache lifetime settings
Installation
- Automatic template file installation to /templates/system/markdown.php
- No manual file copying required
- Works with all Joomla templates
System - Markdown
- Version:
- 5.3.12
- Developer:
- Michael Richey
- Last updated:
-
Feb 22 2026
52 minutes ago - Date added:
- Feb 13 2026
- License:
- GPLv2 or later
- Type:
- Free download
- Includes:
- p
- Compatibility:
- J4 J5 J6
Share