Google AI Overviews can show the contents of the markdown files of web pages directly in the snippets within those AI Overviews. Google's John Mueller called this "unexpected" and that this does not mean Google treats markdown files any differently than any other content page.
Lily Ray spotted this and posted about it on Bluesky - she wrote, "noticing that a lot of AI Overview citations show these markdown tables in the snippet… as an SEO, is there something we should be reading into when we see these?"
Here is her screenshot:
John Mueller from Google replied, "That looks unexpected - can you DM me the details? happy to pass it on. Thanks!"
As a reminder, Google does not use markdown files, LLMS.txt and so on for Google Search. So what this is, is likely that Google just picked up the markdown file like any other file on the web.
I was able to replicate this as well:
Forum discussion at Bluesky.
