Serving Markdown for AI Agents, Now as a Jekyll Plugin

Back in January I wrote Serving Markdown for AI Agents: for every page on this blog, there’s also a .md version at the same URL, discoverable via a <link rel="alternate" type="text/markdown"> tag, so AI agents can fetch clean Markdown instead of parsing HTML. It also made me $360, via referral conversions an AI agent apparently generated after reading the clean Markdown version of a post. That worked, but it lived in this repo as a one-off script, _scripts/render_markdown.rb, wired into the GitHub Actions deploy workflow (needed since GitHub Pages’ native build only allows a small allowlist of plugins, which jekyll-md isn’t on), with the <link> tags added by hand via Liquid and a markdown_url front matter field on every page. I’ve since extracted all of it into jekyll-md, a proper Jekyll plugin. It does the same thing - converts each page’s fully rendered HTML output to Markdown and injects the discovery <link> tag - but as a Jekyll::Generator and Jekyll::Hooks, with no external…