Convert a web page to Markdown

Paste a URL and get the article as clean Markdown — headings, links, and tables kept; navigation, scripts, cookie banners, and ad markup gone. The page is fetched directly from your Mac.

How to convert a URL

Press ⌘L in Milldown (or copy a URL and press ⇧⌘V anywhere in the app).If your clipboard already holds a URL, it's pre-filled.
Milldown fetches the page and extracts the readable content.Wikipedia articles get special handling for their structure; YouTube URLs return the transcript.
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 ~97,200 tokens as raw page source and ~14,600 as Markdown — an 85% saving. The article on Switzerland: 546,600 down to 115,400, or 79%. Most pages land between 70% and 85%, 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.

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.

Try it on your own files

Milldown converts PDFs, Office documents, web pages, and scans into clean Markdown — entirely on your Mac. Free for 14 days.

Get Milldown for macOS

macOS 14+ · Apple Silicon · $39 one-time after trial (excl. VAT) · no subscription