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Why Does My Page Have a .md Version? How to Turn It Off

Symptom. Appending .md to a page’s URL serves a Markdown version of it — and that includes pages you never thought of as “content,” like your blog index (/blog.md), which comes back as a Markdown digest of your recent post excerpts. You’d like some pages to not have a Markdown version at all.

Why this happens. Waggle’s AI-readable Markdown feature publishes a .md variant of every published post and page (of the post types you’ve enabled) so AI crawlers and agents can read your content as clean text. Two details combine to produce the surprising cases:

  1. Your blog index is a WordPress Page. If Settings → Reading assigns a page (say, “Blog”) as your posts page, that page is a real published Page — so it qualifies for a .md variant like any other.
  2. Pages with no written content fall back to a live render. A posts page (or a page built with a page builder or a PHP template) has an empty content field. Rather than publish an empty .md, Waggle renders the page the way a visitor sees it and converts the main content region to Markdown. For a blog index, that main region is the list of recent posts — hence the digest.

This is working as designed — the .md pages are noindex for search engines, carry a canonical link back to the HTML page, and only ever expose content that is already public. But whether a given page should have one is your call, not ours.

How to confirm. Open the page in the editor and look at the Waggle sidebar under Indexing. If the “Hide the Markdown version” toggle is visible, the page currently publishes a .md variant; its help text shows the state either way. Or just request the URL: curl -sI https://example.com/blog.md — a 200 with X-Robots-Tag: noindex is Waggle’s Markdown variant.

Fix — three levels of control, most-specific first:

  1. One page: edit the page, open the Waggle sidebar → Indexing → turn on Hide the Markdown version. The .md URL starts returning 404 immediately and the autodiscovery link disappears from the HTML. (The page stays listed in llms.txt, but its entry switches to the normal page URL.) For several pages at once, use the Markdown column’s bulk actions in the posts list — see machine files.
  2. A whole post type: Waggle → AI → Machine files → switch off that type’s toggle under AI-readable Markdown.
  3. Site-wide: the same screen’s master switch for AI-readable Markdown turns the channel off everywhere.

None of these affect your HTML pages, search indexing, or sitemap — they only govern the Markdown variant.