Recently, Google’s John Mueller waded into a debate that sounds technical but is really about discipline. Marketers had started building separate, stripped-down “markdown” versions of their web pages — clean text files meant to make life easier for AI crawlers and large language models. Mueller’s response was blunt: a well-built HTML page already works for people, search engines, and AI at the same time. A second, machine-only copy doesn’t add much. It just becomes one more thing to maintain.
That last phrase is the whole point. And it applies to far more than markdown pages.
Marketing has a technical debt problem
“Technical debt” is a term borrowed from software engineering. It describes the future cost of the shortcuts, extra systems, and quick fixes you put in place today. Like financial debt, it accrues interest: every tool, pixel, page variant, and automation you add is something someone has to own, update, and eventually untangle — long after the person who built it has moved on.
Here’s the part most articles get wrong: debt isn’t automatically bad. A mortgage helps you buy a house; a payday loan for a lottery ticket does not. The difference is whether you took it on deliberately, for a real reason, with a plan to manage it. The dangerous kind of marketing debt is the kind you accumulate by accident and never pay down.
It might even help to split the term in two. Some of what we carry is genuine debt: the stuff that piled up unintentionally and now quietly rots. The rest is better called baggage, things you chose to carry because they serve the business. Baggage is fine. Forgotten debt is what hurts you.
Where it hides
Once you start looking, marketing baggage is everywhere. A few examples you’ve probably seen:
- AMP — the ghost of this exact debate. A few years ago, Google championed AMP, and marketers dutifully built parallel AMP versions of their pages to win visibility. Then Google quietly dropped the requirement, and everyone was left maintaining a second version of their site for a benefit that had disappeared. The markdown story is this one, rhyming.
- Martech stack bloat. Overlapping tools that half-do the same job, each with its own login, integration, and renewal invoice. Nobody uses all of them; everybody maintains all of them.
- Tag and pixel sprawl. Tracking tags that accumulate for years, slow your site down, and quietly create privacy and consent liabilities long after anyone remembers what they actually measure.
- Orphaned landing pages. Campaign pages are cheap to spin up and easy to forget. Multiply that by every promotion over five years, and you have a graveyard of broken links and off-brand pages still ranking in Google.
- Automation spaghetti. Elaborate email sequences and lead-scoring rules whose logic no one can explain, because the person who built them left in 2022.
- Chasing every new format. PWAs, chatbots, llms.txt, markdown pages. Adopting speculative standards before the platforms themselves have committed to them.
None of these are evil. Each one probably made sense the day it was added. The trouble is that marketing tends to add and rarely subtract.
The real question
You can’t avoid technical debt, and you shouldn’t try. Sometimes the right move is to take it on knowingly to hit a revenue target, launch before a competitor, or serve a market you’re actively chasing. If it moves the business forward, the debt is worth it, full stop.
The question is never “debt or no debt.” It’s whether the solution you chose is sustainable, and whether you chose it on purpose. A custom hack that saves a launch and gets cleaned up next quarter is smart borrowing. The same hack, left running and undocumented for three years, is the expensive kind.
That reframes the AI-markdown question nicely. Building machine-only pages isn’t questionable because it’s technical. It’s questionable because no major AI provider is actually asking for it. You’d be taking on real, ongoing maintenance for a hypothetical payoff. Mueller himself allows one exception: developer documentation, where clean markdown genuinely helps. Deliberate, justified, sustainable; exactly the test.
A gut-check before you add the next thing
You don’t need an audit committee. You need four honest questions:
- Does this serve a real, current need or a hypothetical future one?
- Is the payoff based on an official signal, or are we guessing what a platform might want?
- Who owns this in twelve months, when the campaign is over, and the vendor rep has changed?
- If it doesn’t work out, how hard is it to switch off?
If you can’t answer those, you’re not making an investment. You’re taking out a loan you’ll forget you signed.
The takeaway
Mueller’s markdown comment wasn’t really about markdown. It was a reminder that every clever addition is also a standing obligation. The goal isn’t to build less out of fear; it’s to build deliberately, keep a clear head about what each choice will cost you to maintain, and be willing to switch things off when they stop paying their way.
Borrow when it moves the business. Just make sure you always know what you’re carrying.
Also read:
Age of AI Is Age of Marketing Tech Transferability
The Silent Budget Drain: What Unstructured Marketing Really Costs