Google AI Overviews Showing Markdown Files in Snippets — Unexpected Behavior Confirmed

Lily Ray spotted Google AI Overviews pulling content directly from .md files and displaying it in AI Overview snippets. John Mueller confirmed it was unexpected — but Google IS crawling and surfacing .md content in AI Overviews despite Mueller previously calling markdown for bots a stupid idea. This is de facto behavior: Google ingests .md files for AI Overviews.

High — Google is de facto using .md content in AI Overviews; the review site that publishes clean .md companions gets cited first

• Create .md companion files for top review pages with structured review data: star rating, pros/cons list, feature summary, price, verdict — link from HTML with link rel=alternate type=text/markdown
• Format review summaries as markdown tables — AI crawlers parse markdown tables more cleanly than HTML; a well-structured .md review companion is cleaner AI extraction than raw HTML with ads, nav, and scripts
• Monitor .md vs .html citation rates — track whether Google cites .md files or HTML pages in AI Overviews; if .md wins, consider markdown-first publishing for review content