Search Engine Answer research artifact

Cloudflare Content Format: 25-Request Observation Sheet

Five request variants were sent to five Cloudflare-owned pages. This sheet separates the requested Accept value from the served Content-Type and preserves the sample boundary.

Run: 2026-09-01 00:28:29–00:28:38 UTCSample: 25 GET requestsPages: 5Client: declared SEA lab user agent

Download raw CSV Cloudflare field definitions

Result summary

25/25responses returned HTTP 200

5/5text/markdown requests returned Markdown

20/20other request variants returned HTML

92.67%weighted body-byte reduction in the five HTML/Markdown pairs

Boundary: the test client was Search Engine Answer, not an AI crawler. The result verifies negotiation behavior on this sample; it does not measure crawler preference, indexing, training, citation, referral, or conversion.

Request-to-response matrix

Five Cloudflare pages tested for each request variant
Request variant	Requests	HTTP 200	HTML	Markdown
No `Accept` header	5	5	5	0
`/`	5	5	5	0
`text/html`	5	5	5	0
`text/markdown`	5	5	0	5
`application/json`	5	5	5	0
Total	25	25	20	5

Observed HTML and Markdown body sizes

Body bytes from explicit `text/html` and `text/markdown` requests
Page	HTML bytes	Markdown bytes	Reduction	Markdown / original tokens
Markdown for Agents reference	186,385	17,190	90.78%	4,289 / 46,485
Analyze AI traffic	131,858	15,184	88.48%	3,791 / 32,863
AI Crawl Control changelog	151,904	23,849	84.30%	5,951 / 37,870
Docs for Agents	121,142	10,763	91.12%	2,685 / 30,185
Markdown for Agents blog post	534,785	15,561	97.09%	3,856 / 133,525
Five-page total	1,126,074	82,547	92.67%	20,572 / 280,928

Reductions are Search Engine Answer calculations. Token values are the x-markdown-tokens and x-original-tokens response headers returned with the Markdown representations.

Raw CSV fields

Scope: page key, canonical test URL, request variant, and UTC retrieval time.
Response: HTTP status, returned content type, body bytes, and declared content length.
Conversion: Markdown and original token headers when returned.
Delivery: Cloudflare cache status and Vary.
Integrity: SHA-256 hash of each captured response body.

Method and repeatability

Send one GET per page and request variant with a declared, non-impersonating client user agent.
Preserve headers and bodies privately; record response metadata and body hashes in the public ledger.
Compare request Accept and response Content-Type before calculating size differences.
Keep real crawler demand, representation parity, citations, referrals, and conversions as separate studies.

The capture script and private raw responses are retained in the Batch 24 editorial package. Re-run the test before treating the numbers as current because page content and edge behavior can change.