Cloudflare Fundamentals – Markdown responses for Cloudflare 1xxx errors

Cloudflare now returns structured Markdown responses for Cloudflare-generated 1xxx errors when clients send Accept: text/markdown.

Each response includes YAML frontmatter plus guidance sections (What happened / What you should do) so agents can make deterministic retry and escalation decisions without parsing HTML.

In measured 1,015 comparisons, Markdown reduced payload size and token footprint by over 98% versus HTML.

Included frontmatter fields:

• error_code, error_name, error_category, http_status
• ray_id, timestamp, zone
• cloudflare_error, retryable, retry_after (when applicable), owner_action_required

Default behavior is unchanged: clients that do not explicitly request Markdown continue to receive HTML error pages.

Negotiation behavior

Cloudflare uses standard HTTP content negotiation on the Accept header.

• Accept: text/markdown -> Markdown
• Accept: text/markdown, text/html;q=0.9 -> Markdown
• Accept: text/* -> Markdown
• Accept: */* -> HTML (default browser behavior)

When multiple values are present, Cloudflare selects the highest-priority supported media type using q values. If Markdown is not explicitly preferred, HTML is returned.

Availability

Available now for Cloudflare-generated 1xxx errors.

Get started

curl -H "Accept: text/markdown" https://<your-domain>/cdn-cgi/error/1015

Reference: Cloudflare 1xxx error documentation

Source: Cloudflare

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