---
title: "Markdown for retrieval"
summary: "What optimiseForRAG is for, when to turn it on, and what it costs you in structure."
category: "developer"
tags: ["kerf", "rag", "retrieval", "chunking", "embeddings", "optimiseForRAG"]
updated: "2026-09-14T04:25:07.666Z"
url: "https://support.quorumtech.ch/articles/kerf-for-rag"
markdown: "https://support.quorumtech.ch/articles/kerf-for-rag.md"
---

# Markdown for retrieval

Most systems that feed web pages to a language model do not hand it the whole page. They cut the page into chunks of a few hundred to a couple of thousand characters, store the chunks, and at question time retrieve the few that look most like the question. That is retrieval-augmented generation, and it changes what good Markdown looks like.

Markdown written for a person keeps every heading and every table, because a person reads a section at a time and scans a table by its columns. A chunker does neither. It cuts wherever its size limit falls, often at a heading, and a fact that was spread across a heading, a line and a table cell ends up in pieces that are retrieved separately or not at all. A price ends up in a chunk that never says which product it belongs to. A row from the middle of a table arrives without its column names.

`optimiseForRAG` shapes the Markdown so that a chunk holds whole facts:

```json
{
  "url": "https://www.anthropic.com/pricing",
  "optimiseForRAG": true,
  "linksEnabled": false,
  "wait": 4000
}
```

What you see in the result is Markdown with fewer headings, no Markdown tables, and the same words. A product's name stays with its figures, and each row of a table carries the names of its columns, so a chunk cut anywhere still says what it is about. Code samples are left as they are. `report.optimiseForRAG` says whether the shaping was applied, and the cache keeps the shaped and plain reads of a page apart, so switching it on for one call never hands you a shaped page on the next.

## When to turn it on

If the Markdown goes into a chunker and an index, turn it on. Retrieval improves, and nothing you would ask a retriever for is lost.

If people read the Markdown, or your code parses its headings and tables, leave it off. There are fewer headings, so a table of contents built from the Markdown is shorter, and there are no Markdown tables, so a renderer that draws tables has nothing to draw.

`linksEnabled: false` is a good companion. Addresses take up room in a chunk and match nothing anyone asks.