Your AI Agent Doesn't Need Firecrawl Anymore

And honestly? It's about time. I've been building AI agents that consume web content for a while now. I've also been running sites behind Cloudflare for years. So when they announced Markdown for Agents this week, I didn't just read the blog post — I felt it. Because I've lived on both sides of this problem, and I know exactly how much unnecessary pain this eliminates. Let me explain why this is a bigger deal than most people realize. The Dirty Secret of Every AI Agent Pipeline Here's what building an AI agent that browses the web actually looks like today: Your agent needs information from a webpage You fetch the HTML You stare at 900KB of <div> soup, inline styles, tracking scripts, and navigation menus You pipe it through Firecrawl, Crawl4AI, Jina Reader, or your own janky Playwright script You get markdown back You feed it to your LLM You pray the conversion didn't mangle anything important Every. Single. Time. And look — tools like Firecrawl and Crawl4AI are genuinely great. I've