Summary
Cloudflare's Workers AI toMarkdown and AI Search now convert GIF and BMP images into searchable Markdown descriptions, extending the existing JPEG, PNG, WebP, and SVG support with no configuration changes required.
What changed
On July 8, 2026, Cloudflare added .gif and .bmp support to Workers AI toMarkdown. Each image is resized, the first frame is used for animated GIFs, an object-detection model identifies contents, and a vision model writes a natural-language description that becomes searchable Markdown. AI Search calls toMarkdown automatically, so GIF and BMP files are indexed on the next sync.
Why it matters
Retrieval quality for AI Search depends on how much of a corpus can be turned into machine-readable text. Broadening image-to-Markdown coverage means more of a customer's existing assets become retrievable by agents and RAG pipelines without manual preprocessing, incrementally widening what Cloudflare's search layer can ground answers on.
Evidence excerpt
Workers AI Markdown conversion (toMarkdown) now supports .gif and .bmp image files. AI Search uses toMarkdown automatically to process the files it ingests, so any .gif and .bmp files are included the next time your index syncs, with no configuration changes required.