Paste the answer, keep the words, lose the asterisks. Headings, bold, links, lists, tables and code fences all come out the other side as ordinary text.
Chatbots write Markdown whether you ask for it or not. In the chat window you never see it, because the window renders it: the asterisks become bold, the hashes become headings, and it all looks deliberate.
Copy it out and the raw markers come with it. Your CMS field, your email client, your CSV cell and your customer's inbox mostly do not render Markdown, so what was formatting turns back into punctuation sprinkled through the text.
That is the moment you notice how much of it there was.
Stripping the markers should not flatten the document into a wall of text, so the shape is kept wherever plain text can carry it. A heading keeps its words and loses its hashes. A bulleted list stays a bulleted list; a numbered one keeps its numbers, because those are information rather than decoration.
A table comes back as rows with a tab between the cells, which reads fine and pastes into a spreadsheet with the columns still lined up. Code keeps its contents and loses the fence, and nothing inside a code block is treated as formatting — an asterisk in there is an asterisk.
This goes one way and produces text, not markup. If what you actually want is Markdown turned into HTML for a web page, this is the wrong tool and you want a renderer.
It is also not an HTML stripper. Raw tags are left exactly where they are, on the grounds that quietly deleting something that might be deliberate is worse than leaving it. If your text has both, run it through Strip HTML afterwards.
And it is one-directional. There is no way back to the Markdown from here, so keep the original if you might still want it.
No. The markers are gone, and there is no way to work out from plain text which words were bold. Keep the original if there is any chance you will want it, particularly for a long document.
You choose. By default a link becomes the words it was wrapped around, which is what you want for something a person will read. Switch to the other option and the URL follows in brackets, which is what you want when the destination matters and nothing on the page will be clickable.
The dashes under the header row go, and each remaining row comes back as its cells with a tab between them. That reads sensibly as text and pastes into a spreadsheet with the columns landing where they should. Untick the option to drop tables entirely.
No. Markdown and HTML are different problems, and deleting a tag that might have been deliberate is worse than leaving it alone. If your text has both, run it through Strip HTML afterwards. If the leftovers are citation brackets rather than Markdown, the AI Citation Remover is the one you want.
Because it was never formatting. A lone asterisk with nothing closing it, a multiplication sign in 5 * 3, or one that was escaped with a backslash are all just characters, and they are left where they are. Markdown only treats them as markers in pairs, and so does this.