In late June turva.dev published a post on what an agent pays to read a page, and the measurement in it said the homepage as markdown cost roughly a third of the HTML form. The most recent startuphub.ai scan reports the same homepage at 10,320 tokens as HTML and 1,723 as markdown. That is a sixth of the cost, an 83% saving, and nothing in the meantime was done to improve the number.
Where the weight came from
Since that post went out the site has gained seven blog posts before this one, two tool pages, a feed, a share image for every page and related links at the end of every post. None of that was content negotiation work. It was ordinary growth, and it landed where growth always lands, on the human-facing page. Between the 1 July and 4 July scans alone the HTML form of the homepage went from 9,560 tokens to 10,320, about 8% heavier in three days. The markdown form went from 1,750 to 1,723. It got slightly smaller.
Two surfaces, two growth rates
The HTML form of a page carries everything a site accumulates: navigation, styling, social metadata, structured data and links to whatever shipped last week. Each of those earns its place for a human reader or a search engine. The markdown form carries the words and the links and nothing else, so it grows only when the actual content grows. Serve one surface to everyone and every agent pays for the whole accumulation on every visit. Serve both forms from the same URL and the costs come apart on their own, the human page free to get richer while the agent page stays at the price of the text.
Read the number yourself
The token split is not self-reported. The startuphub.ai scanner prints the token count of both forms of a page with every scan it runs, on any site it is pointed at, and turva.dev logs the pair after every deploy. The June post carried the measurement of its day and this one carries the measurement of 4 July. If the pattern holds, a later post will quote a wider gap still, because the human surface keeps accumulating and the text does not.
For an audit that measures what agents pay to read your site, contact [email protected].
Originally published at https://turva.dev/blog/cheaper-pages-revisited
SOCIAL SHARE CARD GENERATOR