It’s how people learn about, trust, and get value from what you built — often without ever talking to your team. When it’s good, it fades into the background. When it’s not, everything feels harder than it should.
But after years of creating and maintaining documentation, we realized that no matter how certain we are that our docs are making a difference, we didn’t have solid data to prove it.
That’s why we created the State of Docs report.
Docs impact is real, but it’s rarely tidy. Good documentation prevents problems you’ll never see, reduces questions that never get asked, and improves a product experience in ways that don’t fit neatly into one metric. So teams end up explaining the same things again and again: what “good” looks like, who docs are for, and how to measure success without chasing vanity numbers.
We wanted an answer that’s bigger than opinion.
Mapping the docs landscape
AI is changing how documentation gets created and consumed. And docs work is changing too — who contributes, how it gets made, and what teams expect it to do for the wider business. But we’re often missing shared benchmarks for what success looks like, which metrics are meaningful, and how other teams are tackling the same problems.
State of Docs is our attempt to fill this gap with more concrete answers from across the industry.
The annual report brings together insights from documentation contributors in every form. It’s not a ranking or a rulebook. It’s a snapshot of how docs teams work, what they’re shipping, what’s changing, what’s hard, and what “success” looks like right now — supported by practitioner perspectives and deeper stories.
We launched the first report in 2025. We’re building the picture year by year.
Read the 2025 report here.
And if you’re working on docs today — wrestling with metrics, collaboration, quality, or the impact of AI — take the 2026 survey. Add your voice, and help turn shared instincts into something we can all point to.
