AI Data Format: Helping AI Read Text with Markdown

This data was originally featured in the June 18th, 2025 newsletter found here: INBOX INSIGHTS, June 18, 2025: When AI-First Goes Wrong Part 4, Helping AI Read Text with Markdown

In this week’s Data Diaries, let’s talk about another AI data format. Previously, we talked about how to convert CSV files (tables) into JSON (written language) to help AI better and more easily understand what our data means.

Document structure is something AI tools have been trained to recognize, so the more structured and formatted our documents, the easier it is for them to understand our intentions. Putting things in lists helps not only humans read data, but also AI.

Today, the gold standard for document structure is a format called Markdown. Markdown is a way to create structure within text, such as headings, subheadings, bold, italics, lists, and other forms of text markup. Unlike other formatting, however, Markdown is written in plain text itself.

Here’s an example. To make text bold in Markdown, we just use the plain text two asterisks in a row before and after the text:

**bold**

This tells a Markdown-aware application to render the text in a bold font.

Many popular tools like Hemingway, Joplin, and others can also read and write Markdown natively – but the secret is, any text file reader can read Markdown, because it’s just plain text. That in turn means your documents in Markdown will be readable in decades to come because there’s no proprietary, special format. It’s just plain text.

AI language models like the ones that power ChatGPT often will spit out Markdown as their native format. It’s the text format that’s easiest for them to understand – and as such, it can lend additional emphasis and structure to our documents.

If we want AI tools to most easily recognize our text and what we intend, formatting our documents as Markdown is the best way to do that. Markdown also saves space; PDF files can be 3-5 times as large as the same equivalent document in Markdown because it’s just plain text.

Want to convert a document into Markdown in a low-tech way? Load your document into Google Docs, go to the Download menu, and choose Markdown. It’ll make a Markdown file of your text. You can then drag and drop that Markdown file into a tool like ChatGPT or Claude and it’ll understand it – and better, it’ll recognize and understand the structure of your document easily, helping it generate better, more precise results.

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