Turn documents into AI-ready Markdown
Upload PDFs, Office files, images, or HTML and get clean Markdown built for ChatGPT, Claude, RAG pipelines, and automation.
- Free trial, no credit card
- Clean Markdown output
- Web app and developer API
Markdown built for AI
A PDF renders perfectly for a human and falls apart the moment a model reads it: columns merge, tables collapse, reading order breaks. markitdown.ai turns PDFs, Office files, images, and web content into clean Markdown you can preview, download, and reuse in ChatGPT, Claude, RAG pipelines, and agents — free in the browser, or via API for production workflows.
The problem
Documents aren't AI-ready
Most documents were built for people and printers, not for language models. Before a file can be embedded, retrieved, or reasoned over, it has to become predictable text. That is harder than it looks, and it is exactly where naive extraction breaks down.
Reading order breaks
Multi-column PDFs, headers, and footnotes get interleaved, so the text an LLM reads no longer matches the document a human sees.
Tables and headings flatten
Copy-paste collapses tables into runs of numbers and drops the heading hierarchy that gives a document its structure.
Scans need OCR
Image-based pages and scanned contracts carry no text layer at all until they are run through optical character recognition.
Raw text is noisy
Ad-hoc extraction leaves page numbers, broken hyphenation, and stray characters that pollute prompts and retrieval results.
RAG pipelines and agents need consistent structure, not just extracted characters. Predictable Markdown is what makes chunking, embedding, and retrieval behave the same way across thousands of documents instead of failing quietly on the messy ones.
Why teams keep using it
Built for AI workflows
The free converter gets you a first result fast. The reason people stay is everything that happens after the first file: history, batches, larger documents, and an API that folds conversion into the systems you already run.
Start with one file, free
Upload a document and see real Markdown in the browser before you create an account. The first conversion takes seconds, not a sales call.
Make repeated work manageable
Once converting documents becomes routine, saved history, a paired source-and-output library, and batch conversion keep you from re-running the same files by hand.
Wire it into production
A developer API turns conversion into a step inside your ingestion jobs, internal tools, and agent pipelines instead of a manual browser task.
Handle bigger, harder files
Higher size and page limits plus asynchronous processing mean long reports and large decks convert reliably rather than timing out.
Output built for AI
Structure-aware Markdown is ready to chunk, embed, and retrieve, so what you feed an LLM, a RAG index, or an agent stays predictable.
Use cases
Made for every team
RAG and AI pipelines
Convert source documents into clean Markdown before chunking, embedding, or agent processing. Predictable structure means your splitter sees real headings and tables instead of a wall of extracted text, which keeps retrieval relevant and prompts free of layout noise.
Research and reports
Turn papers, whitepapers, and slide decks into editable, searchable Markdown. Researchers and analysts can quote, annotate, summarize, and reuse findings without retyping tables or losing the reading order of a dense PDF.
Operations documents
Process policies, contracts, invoices, and internal files without manual copy-paste cleanup. A saved Markdown history makes recurring document work easier to review, compare, and reuse across a team's day-to-day operations.
Developer automation
Use the API to convert files inside ingestion jobs, internal tools, and document workflows. Submit a job, receive Markdown, and feed it into a CMS, knowledge base, support bot, or agent pipeline with output you can depend on.
Output quality
Structure, not just text
Anyone can dump characters out of a PDF. The goal here is Markdown that keeps the structure your downstream tools depend on, produced by a server-side parsing pipeline instead of fragile browser copy-paste.
- Preserves headings, lists, tables, and reading order where possible
- Handles common document formats through a server-side parsing pipeline
- Built for async workloads, larger files, and future OCR and layout enhancements
markitdown.ai is built on a self-hosted parsing architecture, with OCR and layout enhancements on the roadmap rather than presented as finished. Every conversion should produce an artifact you can inspect, save, and reuse — that is the bar.
Browser or API
The web app covers one-off and recurring manual conversion. The API covers everything that should happen automatically. Most teams start in the browser and move to the API once conversion becomes part of a product or an internal workflow.
- Upload files and preview rendered Markdown
- Save conversion history and download results
- Batch convert repeated work
- Track credits and usage
- Submit conversion jobs by API key
- Poll for results or receive callbacks
- Feed Markdown into RAG ingestion and CMS workflows
- Run conversion inside internal tools and agents
Turn a document into Markdown
Free in your browser, no sign-up. Sign in for saved history, batch, and the API.
