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

Symptom. Adding .md to a page's URL returns a Markdown copy of it. That includes
pages you never thought of as content, like your blog index at /blog.md, which comes back
as a list of recent post excerpts. You want some pages to have no Markdown version.

Why this happens. Waggle publishes a .md copy of every published post and page, for
the post types you have switched on, so AI crawlers can read your content as plain text.
Two things combine to produce the odd cases:

  1. Your blog index is a WordPress Page. If Settings → Reading uses a page called
    "Blog" as your posts page, that is a real published Page. It gets a .md copy like any
    other page.
  2. Pages with no stored content are rendered live. A posts page, or a page built with a
    page builder, has an empty content field. Instead of publishing an empty file, Waggle
    loads the page the way a visitor sees it and converts the main content area. On a blog
    index, that area is the list of recent posts.

This is working as designed. The .md pages are noindex, they carry a canonical link
back to the HTML page, and they only ever show content that is already public. Whether a
given page should have one is your call.

Is restricted content safe? Yes, from Waggle 1.0.5 onwards. The .md copy is now built
the same way the page itself is displayed, as an anonymous visitor. If a membership or
paywall plugin hides a post's body from logged-out readers, the .md copy hides it too.
Password-protected posts and drafts never had a .md version. If you are on an older
version, update. See
restricted content showing in your .md pages.

How to confirm. Open the page in the editor and look at the Waggle sidebar under
Visibility. If you see the "Hide the Markdown version" toggle, the page publishes a .md
copy. Or request the URL:

curl -sI https://example.com/blog.md

A 200 with X-Robots-Tag: noindex is Waggle's Markdown copy.

Fix. Three levels of control, most specific first:

  1. One page. Edit it, open the Waggle sidebar → Visibility → turn on Hide the
    Markdown version    . The .md URL returns 404 straight away and the discovery link
    disappears. The page stays listed in llms.txt, but the entry switches to the normal
    page URL. For several pages at once, use the Markdown column's bulk actions in the
    posts list.
  2. A whole post type. Waggle → AI Visibility → LLMs.txt & Markdown → turn off that
    type's toggle under Markdown versions (.md).
  3. The whole site. The master switch on the same screen.

None of this affects your HTML pages, search indexing or sitemap. It only controls the
Markdown copy.