12 AEO Best Practices for docs

If you've watched a coding agent quietly read your documentation, run a command based on what it found there, and never once render the page in a browser, you've seen the audience this post is about. Nobody clicked a link. Nobody looked at your carefully designed nav bar. An agent fetched a URL, parsed it, and acted. In January 2025, we made a small change to Expo documentation that turned out to matter more than we expected at the time: we added support for a curated text file served publicly, called llms.txt. Back then, adding llms.txt to a site was a fringe proposal. Now we know it helps AI agents fetch content and search through documentation while doing a task. Everything since that pull request has been us reacting to a new kind of reader: AI coding assistants and agents that write code, run tests, search documentation, and pick the right method or library for the job. In short: agents are now building a good chunk of the React Native and Expo apps out there. This post walks th