Read

Markdown

Ask sites for markdown first, so your agent reads clean text.

With prefer_markdown, the first request asks for text/markdown. Sites that support Markdown for Agents answer with markdown directly; everyone else gets the usual HTML route.

No browser and no extra request when the site supports it.
On by default in the MCP read tool.
Jina Reader returns markdown for sites that don’t.

Usage

page = await web.read("https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/reference/markdown-for-agents/",
                      policy_overrides={"prefer_markdown": True})

frankensurf read https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/reference/markdown-for-agents/ --markdown

{ "tool": "read", "arguments": { "url": "https://developers.cloudflare.com/fundamentals/reference/markdown-for-agents/" } }

{
  "title": "Markdown for Agents",
  "content_type": "text/markdown; charset=utf-8",
  "text": "---\ndescription: Cloudflare's Markdown for Agents converts HTML to Markdown at the edge…",
  "structured": { "format": "markdown" },
  "receipt": { "method": "http", "latency_ms": 261 }
}

When to turn it off

Markdown keeps links and headings, so it is not always shorter than Frankensurf’s extracted text. If you need the page’s HTML structure, pass prefer_markdown: false (over MCP, in acquisition_policy).