The "Gemini browses for you" caveat

Gemini's URL fetching is a black box: you don't see the rendered HTML it received, you don't see how much got trimmed, and you don't see what bot-detection page it might have hit. When the answers feel oddly hedged or off-topic, the cause is often that Gemini got a Cloudflare challenge instead of the article. Pre-converting eliminates the mystery.

Using Markdown URLs in Vertex and AI Studio

Both Vertex AI and AI Studio accept .md files as native attachments with mime type text/markdown. Convert your target URLs once, persist the Markdown, and feed it to Gemini as a controlled corpus. The 1M context window finally becomes useful for what it was designed for: entire knowledge bases, not single noisy pages.