blog: may 2025

blog/updates-2025-05.md

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+---
+template: '../@theme/templates/BlogPost'
+title: May 2025 updates
+description: Round-up of product features and enhancements from March, April, and May 2025
+seo:
+  title: "Q2 2025 Updates: March through May"
+  description: Round-up of product features and enhancements from March, April, and May 2025
+  image: ./images/past-quarter.png
+author: adam-altman
+date: 2025-06-09
+categories:
+  - company-update
+image: past-quarter.png
+---
+
+# March, April, and May 2025 updates 🚀
+
+The past few months at Redocly have been packed with progress — from shipping **Code Walkthroughs** and **API Functions** to delivering **llms.txt automation**, performance improvements, and deeper AI capabilities.
+Here’s what we’ve been up to:
+
+---
+
+## Changelog and release process improvements
+
+We ship **minor monthly releases** of our new packages (`@redocly/realm`, `@redocly/revel`, and others).
+Throughout the month, we may also release **hotfix patches** for important issues.
+In addition, we provide a **“next” version channel** where customers eager to try upcoming features can get early access.
+
+
+This approach keeps our changelog more **digestible** and makes it easier for teams to manage updates on their own schedule.
+
+---
+
+## Code walkthroughs
+
+Code Walkthroughs is one of our most powerful new features. It allows you to create **side-by-side explanations and functional code samples** that stay synchronized as the reader scrolls.
+
+You can also add **interactive elements** — text inputs, toggles, downloads, previews — to make walkthroughs even more engaging.
+
+Example walkthroughs:
+- [Explaining an Arazzo file](/learn/arazzo/arazzo-walkthrough.md)
+- [API functions tutorial](/docs/realm/extend/api-functions/create-api-functions.md)
+
+As an experiment, we even tested whether LLMs could generate Code Walkthrough docs by giving them a link to our [code walkthrough docs](/docs/realm/author/reference/tags/code-walkthrough/index.md).
+The test was **successful** — opening up new possibilities for automated doc generation!
+
+---
+
+## `llms.txt` automation
+
+We automatically generate an `llms.txt` file — a **lightweight Markdown index** that helps **LLMs understand your documentation structure**.
+
+This improves the **quality of AI-generated answers** by making your docs more easily consumable.
+
+Example `llms.txt`:
+
+```md
+# Redocly Documentation Index
+
+## API Functions
+- [API Functions Reference](/docs/realm/extend/api-functions/api-functions-reference.md)
+- [Creating API Functions](/docs/realm/extend/api-functions/create-api-functions.md)
+
+## Configuration
+- [SEO Configuration](/docs/realm/config/seo.md)
+```
+
+In addition, all of your Markdown pages can be linked to in Markdown format by adding a `.md` to the end of the path.
+
+You can configure `llms.txt` generation — see [SEO configuration docs](/docs/realm/config/seo.md#llmstxt-object).
+
+---
+## API functions
+
+We added API functions which make it much easier to bring in content from first or third party APIs as well as to power forms and more.
+
+Example of an API function:
+```javascript
+import type { ApiFunctionsContext } from '@redocly/config';
+
+export default async function (
+  request: Request, 
+  context: ApiFunctionsContext
+) {
+  // ...
+}
+``` 
+
+Read more about [API functions](/docs/realm/extend/api-functions/api-functions-reference.md)
+
+This feature is available to Reef and Realm subscribers.
+---
+
+## Quality of life improvements 🚀
+
+
+Configuration
+- Enabled **environment variables** in any `redocly.yaml` config value (previously limited to `rbac`, `developerOnboarding`).
+- Introduced `concat` Markdoc function for combining string values.
+
+Search & SEO
+- Added **file version filtering** for Typesense search.
+- Added **customizable sitemap priorities**.
+
+Performance
+- Virtualization in Catalog and Scorecard → faster performance on large API sets.
+- Reduced memory usage for large OpenAPI projects.
+- Partial loading for large OpenAPI descriptions.
+
+Usability
+- Improved Tab navigation in search → first Tab now focuses “Search with AI.”
+- Added “Internal server error” page.
+- Improved Complex badge detection in OpenAPI docs (`allOf` nesting > 5 levels).
+- Added **AI conversations UI** with follow-up questions.
+
+Developer features
+- Added context to configure functions → programmatic setup of request values.
+
+---
+
+## 🚀 Build Redocly with Us!
+
+We're hiring software engineers to help shape the future of API documentation.
+
+✅ Passionate about APIs?\
+✅ Excited by cutting-edge developer tools?
+
+Join our team and be part of something big.
+
+[Apply now →](https://redocly.com/careers#software-engineer)
+
+---
+
+## 🔮 Roadmap Sneak Peek
+
+### Coming soon: Built-in Analytics 📊
+
+Want to know which pages get viewed? Which searches return no results?
+You’re not alone — many customers have asked us for this.
+
+While 3rd party analytics are helpful, they can be difficult to implement (compliance, privacy, etc).
+First-party analytics give you **direct visibility** into how your docs are used — without adding extra tracking scripts or worrying about privacy policies.
+
+We’re building first-class, built-in analytics to answer questions like:
+- How many users searched for “SSO” this week?
+- How many users clicked into SSO docs?
+- How many support conversations happened around SSO?
+
+Example from our internal data:
+- 9 users searched for SSO last week
+- 40 users read SSO docs
+- 2 support tickets were opened
+
+This kind of insight helps us measure **support deflection** and **identify gaps** in docs — and soon, you’ll be able to do the same.
+
+---
+
+### Better AsyncAPI docs
+
+We support the official AsyncAPI docs plugin.
+That's great, but there is still a lot to be desired.
+We use AsyncAPI ourselves to describe websockets, message queues, and more.
+
+We believe the documentation user experience can be improved greatly, and we're working on that.
+
+---
+
+### 🔮 Upcoming Features
+- Performance enhancements – Faster response times and improved stability
+- Catalog – We're doubling down here and building a richer catalog to allow you to describe more types of entities and relationships
+- Visual API workflows builder – A new way to model API interactions