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Making agent-friendly pages with content negotiation
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Making agent-friendly pages with content negotiation

Vercel News·Zach Cowan·4 days ago
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Agents fetch web pages to answer questions, write code, and complete tasks. When an agent requests a page, it gets everything your browser gets, including navigation menus, stylesheets, JavaScript bundles, tracking scripts, and footer links, when all it needs is the structured text on the page. That extra markup confuses the agent, consumes its context window, and makes every request more expensive. Link to heading What is content negotiation What agents need is a way to request just the text content of a page, without the browser-specific markup. Content negotiation solves this. It's a standard HTTP mechanism where the client specifies its preferred format via the Accept header, and the server returns the matching representation. Many agents already send Accept: text/markdown when fetching pages, and a server that supports content negotiation can return clean, structured text from the same URL that serves HTML to a browser.…

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