TL;DR — AI bots (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews) now make up a huge slice of your website traffic. They don't want your beautifully styled HTML. They want clean Markdown — and they'll thank you with citations. This post shows you exactly how to serve it using a 27-year-old HTTP feature that suddenly matters again: content negotiation . The Day I Realized My Real Audience Wasn't Human A few months ago I shipped two side projects. Nothing fancy — a transcription tool and a small productivity app. I did the usual: meta tags, Open Graph, sitemap, lighthouse score in the 90s, the works. The 2018 SEO playbook, basically. Then I opened my Cloudflare analytics one morning and almost spilled my coffee. In the last 24 hours alone : Googlebot → 99 hits Applebot → 48 hits ClaudeBot → 19 hits PerplexityBot , GPTBot , Bingbot , ClaudeSearchBot → dozens more A meaningful chunk of my "traffic" wasn't humans clicking blue links. It was machines.…