Convert a web page to Markdown
Paste a URL and get the page as Markdown — headings, links, tables and emphasis kept, scripts and styling stripped. Wikipedia articles are narrowed to the article body. The page is fetched directly from your Mac.
How to convert a URL
- Press ⌘LCtrl+L in Milldown (or copy a URL and press ⇧⌘VCtrl+V anywhere in the app).If your clipboard already holds a URL, it's pre-filled.
- Milldown fetches the page and converts its body to Markdown.Wikipedia articles get special handling for their structure; YouTube URLs return the transcript. A Wikipedia page is narrowed to the article body; on other sites the whole page body converts, so navigation and footer links usually top and tail the result and are quick to delete.
- Copy the Markdown, save it, or add provenance front matter for your archive.Front matter records the source URL and timestamp — every clip stays citable.
Measured: the Wikipedia article on Markdown is 97,305 tokens as raw page source and 17,771 as Markdown — an 82% saving. Our five-page benchmark corpus lands between 72% and 95% (per-file results), because modern HTML is mostly scripts, styling and tracking.
This baseline assumes you would otherwise ingest the raw page source — which is exactly what a scraper or RAG pipeline does. If instead you copy the rendered text out of your browser by hand, you are already close to what Milldown produces; the gain there is that it is automatic, structured, and keeps the tables.
Before and after, on a real page
Wikipedia’s Markdown article — the raw source a scraper ingests vs what Milldown hands you:
<table class="infobox" about="#mwt6"
id="mwBw"><tbody><tr><th colspan="2"
class="infobox-above" style="padding-
bottom: 0.15em;background-color:
#e0e0e0;color:inherit;">Markdown
</th></tr>…**Markdown** is a lightweight markup
language for creating formatted text
using a plain-text editor…97,305 tokens of source become 17,771 of Markdown on this page — an 82% saving, per-file table on the benchmarks page.
What people use it for
- Research notes — clip articles into Obsidian or Notion as clean, permanent text instead of link rot.
- AI context — "read this article" becomes a paste that costs half the tokens.
- Documentation — snapshot reference pages into your repo where they diff and survive.
Notes
Milldown fetches the page like a browser would — but JavaScript-only sites that render everything client-side may yield thin results. Paywalled content requires access you have in a browser session; Milldown doesn't bypass access controls. See also: YouTube transcripts to Markdown.
Further reading: Measured token savings by file type · Preparing documents for RAG
Try it on your own files
Milldown converts PDFs, Office documents, web pages, and scans into clean Markdown — entirely on your computer. Free for 7 days.
Download for macOSmacOS 14+ · Apple Silicon · $39 one-time after trial (excl. VAT) · no subscription