GitBook

A live walkthrough of everything we shipped recently, and where docs go next.

Agents now read our docs more than humans do. We have the analytics to prove it, and it changed what people are optimizing in their docs. They can't tell good docs from bad ones, so quality matters more now than it ever has. We've spent the last few months building tools that tell you what's missing, broken, or out of date in yours. We’re running a live session on October 1st around what we've shipped: Content gaps, broken links, style guide checks, and a rebuilt analytics view that separates agent traffic from human traffic. Save your spot here: https://buff.ly/T6QnQNi

It's the last day of Write the Docs Berlin! We've met so many great people from the docs community this week, and we're excited to keep those conversations going. If you haven't come said hi yet, find us before the day wraps.

Syncing your GitBook docs with a repo just got a major upgrade. Site-wide Git Sync is now available, which allows you to connect your entire site to a repository with a single configuration for every section and space. It also introduces gitbook-docs.yaml, so you can define and update your site's structure directly in your repo. Add sections, reorder pages, and reshape your navigation through a pull request. Setting it up or migrating your existing setup only takes a few seconds from your site's overview. Read more: https://buff.ly/ZCrEEji

Not all robots are the same. A search crawler indexing your docs is a robot. So is a vulnerability scanner. And so is ChatGPT pulling your API reference right now, because a real person just asked a question that depends on it. Most analytics put all of it in one bucket and call it bot traffic. If you publish with GitBook, your site insights already separate your traffic: which agents are reaching your docs, and what they're requesting. Read more: https://lnkd.in/eD33vTDN

See you in November, London! 🇬🇧 Register here: https://lnkd.in/e3catZ9d

We're heading to Write the Docs Berlin next week! 🇩🇪 Come find the GitBook booth on the 7th and 8th. We want to hear what's working in your docs and what's quietly driving you up the wall. Register here: https://lnkd.in/eqfvMTZt

Last week I got to run a State of Docs panel with Lois Patterson and Write the Docs NYC in New York, my hometown. The weather was terrible, with torrential rains leading to delayed and canceled subways. But the people who came out despite it were super engaged and made me glad to be there. I moderated a conversation with Ravind Kumar from MinIO, Casey Brown from Squarespace, and Nikita Jotwani from HubSpot, and even though they're at different companies and in different roles, they kept coming back to the same question from different directions: if AI can write a decent first draft now, what exactly is left for the writer to do? Their answers were more interesting, and a lot more hopeful, than the doom version of that question usually is. Conversations like this are why I've loved working on State of Docs for the last two years - it's a chance to take stock of where documentation and knowledge infrastructure are heading, at a moment when that's changing fast. I wrote up a longer piece with some thoughts on the panel - the full write-up is on the blog, and the link is in the comments. Thanks to GitBook for sponsoring, Sarah Dugan for flying out to help run the event, and Chris Cho for the great photo!

Our October meetup won't be your typical Write the Docs Bay Area event. We're teaming up with GitBook in San Francisco for Practical AI for Documentation, featuring real-world AI workflows and a rare hands-on workshop. We're moving beyond the AI hype and into practice. You'll see how AI is being used in a real production docs environment, then get the opportunity to work with it yourself. Ian Alton, Head of Technical Writing at Airbyte, will present: "AutoDoc: How Airbyte self-heals and auto-merges docs for 600+ open source connectors." He'll take us behind the scenes of how Airbyte is using AI and automation to maintain documentation at open source scale. Then Addison Schultz and Sarah Dugan from Gitbook will turn the evening hands-on, leading a practical workshop on working with documentation and AI, with GitBook used live as the publishing platform. Bring your laptop and be ready to participate. More workshop details are coming soon. WHAT TO EXPECT • Pizza, drinks, and networking • A quick update from the Tech Writer Scouting Report • A real-world AI documentation case study from Airbyte • A hands-on AI and documentation workshop with GitBook • Q&A and open networking EVENT DETAILS Tuesday, October 6 6:30 to 9:00 PM Mindspace, San Francisco Technical writers, docs engineers, developer advocates, and anyone interested in putting AI to work in documentation are welcome. A huge thank you to GitBook for sponsoring the venue, food, and drinks and for continuing to support the Bay Area technical writing community. Space is limited, so RSVP to save your spot: https://luma.com/mngid6og Looking forward to seeing everyone in October! #TechnicalWriting #Documentation #AI #DeveloperExperience #WriteTheDocs

Moving your docs shouldn't be a one-person job. GitBook Agent can now import your existing docs for you — give it the URL of your current site, and it pulls everything into a change request ready to review. Everyone on the team sees the import as it runs, and you can ask the Agent what landed: the pages, their titles, their sources. Read more about what’s new in GitBook Agent: https://lnkd.in/efe96sFf