2025

Add inline button actions to any page — including search and Ask AI

You now have powerful new options for inline buttons that include search and GitBook Assistant inputs — allowing your users to type a question and activate a search or Assistant chat right from the page.

Plus, you can also create disabled buttons or buttons that trigger a specific preset search or query of your choice.

Here are a few examples of things you can do with the new button actions…

Add a search button with a pre-set search parameter:

Search for "Inline buttons"

Create an empty search bar that users can type directly into to find a topic:

Embed a place for users to ask GitBook Assistant something about your docs:

Add a disabled button to show something is inactive:

Disabled button

You can configure all of these options by hitting / and choosing Button to add a button to your page, then clicking the button to open the Label menu.

Set canonical and alternative page metadata

You can now set the page metadata for canonical and alternate URLs to help search engines understand the relationship between similar pages — which is helpful for SEO.

For example, if you use variants to document multiple versions of your product, but want the current version to be the canonical version for SEO reasons, you can now control this in the Page options menu for your page.

You can select another GitBook page in both the canonical and alternate fields, as well as external URLs.

An improved notification panel

You’ll notice that your notification panel has a new design to make it easier to parse active and inactive notifications.

It also brings in the new colors from our recent rebrand, and adds new icons to make it clear when a notification has been checked.

Other improvements

• You can now stop GitBook Agent’s thinking process when you’re interacting with the Agent through the side panel. Simply hit the Stop button in the chat window.

• We’ve made some visual tweaks to hint blocks to increase their contrast and make the content inside them easier to read. You’ll notice this in dark mode in particular — hint blocks are now much clearer in the GitBook app.

• Following on from our recent rebranding, we've now updated the font within the app to be Inter. This new font should look clean and modern within the app, helping you do your best work.

Fixes

• Fixed a bug that removed the border around site icons in the sidebar.

• Fixed an issue that meant joining a new organization in GitBook when you were already logged in with your account would cause a crash.

• Fixed a small hint block bug that meant page links and other mentions didn’t show a colored background as expected.

• Fixed a bug in the editor where text colored blue would show as red.

• Fixed a bug that meant submitting a change request review would reload the entire page unnecessarily.

A refreshed app look and feel

If you’ve visited our website or logged into the app today, you’ve probably noticed that it’s got a new look. We’re rolling out product changes with care, as we know it’s an essential interface for your docs.

You can read more about what’s new in our announcement blog post, but here’s a quick breakdown of the small changes we’ve made to the app to bring it closer to our new branding:

• New colors – we’ve updated the colors across the app, reducing the amount of teal and focusing on blacks and oranges to match our new brand.

• New images and backgrounds – We’ve also refreshed the imagery within the app to bring it up to date with our latest design language on our website and docs.

• A refreshed home page – The home page has a new layout that helps you quickly jump to the change requests screen and other useful places. We’ll have more improvements coming to the home screen soon.

• A new default page cover image – when you add a cover image to your page, it’s now a nice pale orange to match our overall branding.

Introducing GitBook Agent

Today we introduced GitBook Agent — a collaborator who works alongside your team to ensure your docs are accurate, updated, and fueling growth.

GitBook Agent can:

• Write docs based on a prompt

• Ideate and implement bigger changes

• Understand your style guide

• Follow custom, organization-level instructions

• Summon from a comment

• Review your changes

Head to our announcement blog post to read more about these features — and what powerful upgrades will be available soon.

Read the blog post

Huge change requests improvements

We’ve introduced a new change requests screen that brings every update across your organization into one clear, centralized place.

It’s built for speed and focus — making it easier to navigate, filter, review, and ship docs updates efficiently. You can see a list of change requests with powerful filtering to help you find precisely the ones you need.

And when you open a change request, you’ll see all the information related to it in one place — including the title and description, participants, reviewers, and even all the changes rendered in diff view.

There’s also a new Overview screen for individual change requests within a space that uses the same format to make reviewing changes easier than ever.

Embedded Assistant improvements

We’ve improved the styling and customization options for the embedded version of GitBook Assistant:

• You can now override the default Ask button label and Assistant icon now, if you wish.

• The Assistant now supports light and dark mode, and automatically adjusts to match your product or site’s settings. It’ll remember a user’s settings if they’ve browsed your site before.

• The Assistant window is now very subtly translucent so it blends more seamlessly with your app or website.

You’ll also notice a new sidebar in the embedded Assistant, which lets you switch between two modes — Assistant and documentation. More on that below.

Embed your docs in your product

You can now embed your documentation within your product or website alongside — or instead of — GitBook Assistant.

Users can open the panel and browse your docs as normal in the small window. And if you’re using the Assistant in your docs, that’s available in the other sidebar tab.

Embeddable docs are available on Premium and Ultimate site plans — opening up this powerful embed feature to more users.

GitBook Assistant: Customize suggested questions

You can now customize the questions that appear when users first open GitBook Assistant and the AI search panel (on Premium sites or sites not using the Assistant).

You can define up to five custom questions in your site’s settings screen and these will be shown to visitors when they open Assistant or AI search. If you don’t add custom questions, users will see AI-generated suggestions instead.

Improved

• We’ve tweaked the reasoning for GitBook Assistant to help it deliver responses faster.

• {if} blocks now support all other block types, meaning you can create more detailed conditional blocks using adaptive content — including other {if} blocks for nested conditional content.

Fixed

• Fixed an issue that could occur when importing tables via Git Sync that reset column widths to default rather than maintaining their custom widths.

• Fixed a couple of bugs with lists within hint blocks that meant bullets and numbers were larger than, and misaligned with, the text next to them.

Page link titles, improvements and fixes

You can now set a shorter page link title that will appear in the table of contents — great for tidying up if you have a lot of pages with lengthy titles.

For example, if you have a page with a long title for SEO or accuracy reasons, open the page’s Actions menu and choose Edit title & slug, enable Link title, and then specify a shorter name.

This title will be used for all relative links to the page — including the table of contents, page # mentions, and the page footer navigation.

If you use Git Sync, your page will appear in the SUMMARY.md file like this:

# Table of contents

* [Page main title](page.md "Page link title")

Improved

• You can now hide some site spaces from the navigation at the top of your site

• This PR adds the ability to hide single site spaces within non-default sections, extending the existing site space visibility feature. The implementation includes backend validation to ensure only specific site spaces can be hidden (single spaces in non-default sections), along with frontend UI updates to support toggling visibility for both variants and sections.

• We’ve added a new message for when a Git Sync operation times out, to give you more information about the error and offer some solutions.

Fixed

• Fixed a Markdown bug that meant hitting # then Space at the start of an empty line would open the page link menu and select the first link instead of creating a new H1 header.

• Fixed a crash that could occur when unsuccessfully sending a non-critical notification within the GitBook app.

• Fixed an issue that meant reusable content in another space was missing the external link back to the original content for editing.

• Fixed a bug that affected variants on a default site section for sites that use share links. The variant would cause an infinite redirect when trying to preview the site.

• Fixed a bug in comments that meant @ mentions and page references weren’t working properly.

• Fixed a link menu bug that meant if you started typing in the search bar before the menu options had loaded, it would replace your highlighted text on the page.

A restyle for GitBook Assistant, improved menus and more

We’ve updated the look and feel of GitBook Assistant to give your content more space, added new menus across the app with a number of improvements, and released a ton of fixes.

A more polished Assistant experience

We’ve improved the style and layout of GitBook Assistant to make it more minimal and to give your content more space. The Assistant now appears as a full-length sidebar, nudging your content over while keeping a great layout no matter the size of your screen.

You might also notice that the styling subtly matches your site’s primary color — so the Assistant blends perfectly into your site and feels more branded to your docs.

You’ll also notice improved scroll effects on the chat stream and updated animations that are smoother and, frankly, prettier when answers appear ✨ Plus, there are now up and down buttons for easy navigation through your chat log.

Hit Ask at the top of this page or click here to try the latest Assistant improvements for yourself!

Improved menus across the app

Every menu in the GitBook app has been updated with new features, improved UI and better accessibility.

First, menus now have better focus management — so you can navigate using your keyboard, and if you use your mouse, focus will remain more consistent even when selecting from submenus.

We’ve also added search to every menu. So when you open a menu, you can just start typing to narrow down the options you see.

This search also includes submenu entries. So if you open a space’s Actions menu and type ‘Share’ it will show not only the Share menu item, but also the two submenu items within it — so you can quickly find and select what you need without much manual navigation.

These changes are live now across all menus in the app, so give them a try today.

Better code syntax highlighting, custom links for your site logo and more

With this release, we’ve made your site logo link customizable, plus added Shiki syntax highlighting for code blocks, a new block switching menu, and more.

Set a custom link for your site logo

You can now set a custom link for your docs site’s logo in the top-left corner of your published docs.

By default, clicking the logo or site title will lead users back to the first page of your docs site. But you can now set a custom URL outside your site — or a page, section or variant on your site — to be opened instead. If your docs are part of a larger website, this can help visitors navigate back to your own landing page

To set a custom link, open your site’s Customization settings and switch to the Configure tab. In the Primary link section, add the URL you want your logo to link to.

Shiki syntax highlighting in code blocks

Code blocks in the editor now use Shiki for syntax highlighting, so they’ll render much more consistently with code blocks in your published docs.

That means that your code blocks won’t just have great performance. They’ll also match the same highlight colors as in your published docs — including your site’s custom primary and semantic colors.

Switch block types faster

We’ve added a new option to our inline palette that lets you quickly switch block types with a couple of clicks.

Simply highlight some text in a block and, in the palette that appears, use the dropdown menu to select a block to turn it into. It’s as simple as that!

Embed GitBook Assistant in your product or website

Earlier this year, we released GitBook Assistant — a powerful AI tool that helps your users when they’re browsing your documentation. It was our first step towards what we see as the future of documentation, where product and docs are more intelligently connected.

Now, we’re adding ability to embed the same GitBook Assistant from your docs directly into your product or website.

So your users can access knowledge from your docs — and other tools you choose to connect via MCP — without needing to switch tools. And you can improve customer success by offering them seamless, context-aware answers and suggestions. Paired with adaptive content, it’s like giving every user a personalized product expert, available 24/7.

Head to our Embedded GitBook Assistant docs to learn more about how to get started.

This is a huge step towards our goal of bringing documentation and product closer together. We’d love to hear your initial feedback as it rolls out in beta.

Adjustable page covers, performance improvements and more

Adjustable page cover heights

If you’ve added a cover image to your page, it’s now easier than ever to adjust the size to your liking.

You can use the drag handle or keyboard controls to make it taller or shorter, and you can see the percentage size of the image so you know it’s going to fit properly.

We’ve also added a crosshair to the UI, so that when you drag to reposition the cover you know when it’s perfectly centered.

Big improvements to editor performance

Working on your content is now faster and more performant than the editing experience in Notion. We’ve been working on backend improvements over the last few weeks, and we’ve now achieved a 2x performance improvement in the editor.

Our work on performance and stability improvements continues, but we wanted to share the results of our work with you as we hit this milestone!

Improved inline palette

When you’re editing your work and select something on the page, the inline palette appears to offer you important controls like formatting, links and annotations.

With this release, we’ve rebuilt the behavior of the palette from scratch. It’ll now be more stable if you scroll when it’s open — and it won’t blink when the selection changes. Plus, we’ve just made some overall improvements to performance and moved the link palette so it now appears below your selected text, not above it.

Search result breadcrumbs, better variant + language support and more

Breadcrumbs in search results, better support for languages and versions on the same docs site, a new comments popover panel and plenty of other improvements and bug fixes.

Breadcrumbs in search results

If your site is complex — with a lot of sections or variants — sometimes it’s hard to know if search is taking your users to precisely the page they need.

To make it easier for your users to be confident about choosing a result, we’ve added breadcrumbs to search results. Now they won’t just see the page title and relevant text from the page — they’ll also see the site section, variant, and page group that it lives inside.

Search will show a maximum of three breadcrumbs — if there are more, it’ll just show the first, second and last breadcrumb, with a … truncating the space between.

Better variant support for versions and languages

If you document multiple versions of your product and also want to offer localized versions of those docs with variants, you can now do that in GitBook — as docs sites now support both translation variants and version variants at the same time.

GitBook will automatically recognize these different variant types and show a version dropdown at the top of the sidebar, a translation dropdown in the header — or both.

When there are multiple variants in the same language, GitBook shows each of those languages in the translation dropdown in the header.

Then, the variant picker in the left sidebar will show all the variants available in that language — with the first variant opening by default when you choose a language.

Read and add comments without opening a side panel

Adding a comment or reading comment threads will no longer open the entire comments side panel by default. You can now add and review comments using a new popover menu.

That means you can more easily add comments right alongside the content you’re editing, and check threads right in context.

And if you want to review all the comments on a page or just prefer using the side panel for feedback? You can still access it from the Comments menu in the header bar.

Improvements to change requests, site search, version history and more

Improved sidebars for change requests and version history, plus search improvements, expandable code blocks and more.

A better change requests panel

This release makes it easier for you to view and filter change requests in the sidebar within a space.

First, there are new filters that let you discover change requests you’re involved in more efficiently. For example, you can find change requests based on their creator or participants — or just see those that are awaiting review. Which means in a couple of clicks you can see all the change requests awaiting your review.

The top of the sidebar also shows a few shortcuts to some of these filters, allowing you to instantly narrow down long lists of change requests in busy spaces to just the ones you need.

Site search improvements

Search has had a few upgrades with this release, making it easier for your end-users to find what they need:

• Sites now support type-ahead search queries — which means users will see relevant results even if they don’t finish the word they’re typing. For example, if you search for ‘reusab’ in our docs, you’ll see results for ‘Reusable content’.

• We’ve also improved the search filters to make the UI less obtrusive. Filters are now accessible at the bottom of the search modal — with the option to filter by site sections and then variants, if enabled for a section.

• Finally, two small things. First, you can now hit Esc to close the search window. Plus, AI search now has a nice little animation to make it clear it’s working on an answer — plus a back button to get back to the standard search.

Easier version history browsing

You’ll now see a specific time and date next to each entry in the version history panel, making it easier to find the version you want when browsing back in time.

Talking of going back in time, we’ve also improved the rollback confirmation message, to make it clearer what will happen.

Finally, we’ve fixed a bug that would reload the entire page when navigating between entries in the version history — now only the content of your page will refresh.

Expandable code blocks

You can now choose to make code blocks collapsed and expandable in your docs — perfect for when you have long code blocks that take up a lot of vertical space.

In the editor, simply open the block’s Options menu and enable Expandable. The block will show the first 10 lines of code, with a button to expand to show the rest. Here’s how it looks in practice!

New keyboard shortcuts, block duplication, colored inline icons and more

Quickly switch between paragraphs and headings, duplicate blocks with a tap, add colored icons to your page and more.

Faster heading and paragraph block switching

We’ve added a few new keyboard shortcuts that let you quickly switch a text block between paragraph, H1, H2 and H3. Simply click anywhere in the block you want to switch and hit one of these shortcuts:

We’ve been using it while writing this changelog and it’s great — especially when you forget to hit # at the start of an empty line and you want a header block.

Duplicate any block instantly

One more neat shortcut to speed up your editing workflow: you can now duplicate any block by either hitting ⌘ + D (on Mac) or Ctrl + D (on Windows), or by holding the Alt key and dragging.

If you use the shortcut, a duplicate of your active block will appear below. If you drag, you can place your block anywhere you like on the page.

And of course, it works for more than one block as a time, too — so you can select multiple blocks and duplicate them all with a quick tap.

Add color to inline icons

You can now select a color for inline icons when you add them to your content

This is great if you want to attract attention to certain parts of your page content — or if you just want an inline icon to match the color of your text .

There are six colors to choose from — and if your space is published on a site, you can also choose the primary and semantic colors for the site to align your icon perfectly with the surrounding text.

To change the color of the icon (or choose a different icon from the picker), simply right-click it in the editor.

Quote search for internal content

We now support exact phrase matching for internal search within GitBook.

If you want to find an exact phrase within your docs without bringing up similar matches in your search results, you can now add quotation marks around your text. Remove the quotation marks and the search will work the same way as before, highlighting close — but not exact — matches.

Better migration support, improved search and more

Migration and import improvements, searchable reusable content & API specs, and a bunch of other improvements and bug fixes.

Migration just got easier

This month we’ve improved our import and migration tools.

First, we’ve tweaked the UI copy on the import page to make it clearer that you can easily import your content directly from other docs platforms by simply pasting the URL of your current docs into GitBook.

We now also support .docx imports, making it easier to migrate your knowledge from Microsoft Word docs directly into GitBook. And we’ve added new imagery to the import screen to make it easier for you to find the option you need (and just make the UI look nicer).

We’re still working on making import and migration to GitBook even simpler, so stay tuned for more.

Search reusable content & API specs

We’re currently rolling out a new search backend that also indexes reusable content and API specs, making them easier to find when searching your content. We’re currently running through the reindexing process for every GitBook organization. Once that’s complete, we’ll start enabling it for all organizations.

Get started in empty spaces faster

We all know how blank page syndrome can mentally block you when working on something new. To help you get started in an empty space, we’ve added some quick actions that let you instantly add a heading, image, hint, expandable or code block to an empty page with a single click.

We hope that this will kickstart your creativity while you’re working on new content — and we have more ideas to help with this that we’ll talk about soon.

Frame your images for visual clarity

Image blocks are great for showing off your product, but sometimes the image can blend with the background of your site, potentially confusing users.

To combat this, you can now add a frame to image blocks to give your images a consistent look and visually separate them from their surrounding content.

To add a frame, hover over the image, open the Options menu and enable the With frame toggle.

Here’s how framed images look in published docs:

Comment threads get a better home

When leaving feedback on a change request or page, we noticed that the comments panel could sometimes get a little long, with full threads displaying by default.

To combat this, we’ve removed threads from the full comments panel. Now, a button below the comment will show if it has any replies, and clicking the comment or the button will open the thread full in the side panel.

You can also click the new Expand side panel button to make the panel larger — perfect for longer or more detailed discussions.

Nested section groups, new change request review options and more

We’ve added nested group support for site sections, allowing you to create hierarchical navigation — plus a few other improvements and fixes.

Nested section groups

Support for nested section groups is here! You can now add multiple section groups within a section group and give them all a title and icon. You can even mix sections and nested section groups together — the sections will display in a separate area within the group menu.

We’ve also made some small quality-of-life improvements to the section header. They include a new scrolling system that adds faded edges and scroll buttons when your sections are wider than the container, and some fixes that make sections and groups more responsive and better positioned.

A new toolbar when viewing your docs

You may have noticed a new toolbar that appears when you’re viewing your live docs site, or when viewing a change request preview in its own tab. This new toolbar gives you quick access to useful options with a click — and you can minimize it if you don’t need it.

In a change request preview, the toolbar lets you quickly leave feedback on the change request, view the live site, view the change request in the GitBook app or jump to the editor. This toolbar is only visible to people viewing the change request preview.

A similar toolbar now also appears on you live docs site, only for members of your organization who are logged into GitBook. So if you or a teammate visits your live site, you’ll see the toolbar and can quickly jump to the docs in GitBook to change settings, customize the site, check the insights or edit the content.

Review process improvements

We’ve been working on improvements to the review flow to take advantage of the new side panel we recently launched.

We’ve tweaked the icon for adding reviewers from a cog (which took inspiration from GitHub) to a plus + icon — which makes it clear that it lets you add more reviewers.

We’ve also added a new system that marks previous reviews as outdated when you request a new one — or when you add a new review to a change request you’ve already reviewed. Plus, we’ve added a button that lets you re-request a review.

MCP docs server generator, new search controls & more

You can now MCP servers so AI tools can interact with your docs, plus we’ve added new controls for users searching your docs, improved the page outline, and more.

Generate an MCP server from your docs

GitBook can now automatically create an MCP server for your documentation.

When enabled in your site’s customization options, you give your users the option to quickly copy a link to your MCP server and connect it to other tools. By doing this, your users can access knowledge from your docs in whichever platform they choose to connect to.

For example, if your user adds your docs MCP server to VS Code, they could quickly answer questions or add information from your docs into their coding environment via calls to the MCP server.

You can enable or disable this this in your site’s Customization > Configure menu, under Page actions. Once enabled, users can quickly copy a link to your docs MCP server from the Page actions menu and paste it into configuration sections on other platforms.

We’re adding this to our extensive list of other AI documentation optimizations — including llms.txt and llms-full.txt, easy Markdown page exports, and quick options to open pages in ChatGPT or Claude.

Search scope controls

We’re adding a new way to control search scope on your docs site.

Before, users could only choose the search scope if your site used variants for things like localizations or versioned docs. Now, your users can also choose which site sections to search within.

By default search will always show the best match — which is the user’s current variant and the default variant of every other section. They can choose to only search in your current section, or broaden the search to include all variants across alls sections.

No matter what, GitBook will automatically show the right set of buttons to make it as easy as possible for your site’s visitors to find what they need. For example, in our own docs we only show two buttons — because we have no variants.

It’s also worth noting that we no longer include language variants in the search scope. We assume most users won’t want to search multiple languages, and results in other languages can be confusing and take up space in the results section.

Page outline improvements

We’ve made some small but useful improvements to the page outline in our editor.

First, we’ve separated the On this page title from the outline itself and added an icon to make it easier to find. Plus, the title now stays sticky, even on long pages with lots of sections.

We’ve also improved the scroll behavior for longer pages. If the page outline is scrollable, it stays in sync with the page’s scroll position, keeping the active item at the top as you scroll.

We think this will make scrolling through your content — especially on longer pages — much easier.

Merge rules, improved language selection and more

New ways to control when change requests are merged and by whom, plus improvements to localization support, change requests and more.

Merge rules

With this release, we’ve introduced merge rules for change requests.

Merge rules let you define specific requirements that must be met before a change request can be merged. You can set rules within each individual space, or set rules that apply across your entire organization, which you can then override within a single space if needed.

We’ve made it easy to configure with a bunch of presets to match your team’s requirements — from requiring the change request to have a subject, to requiring review from specific members. You can combine rules in any way you like to build more complex workflows, as well as write dynamic expressions using the same language as for adaptive content.

When a change request hasn’t met all the merge requirements, the Merge button is disabled and a tooltip explains why it can’t be merged.

We’re rolling this out starting with early access users today. It will be available for everyone on the Pro plan soon. This feature has been requested a lot recently, so we’re super happy to ship it!

Improved language selection

If you’ve used translations to localize your site into different languages, we’ve improved your users’ experience when browsing your docs.

A new language picker now appears in the top-right of the screen, allowing site visitors to select their preferred language — and that language will be maintained when navigating between site spaces and within search results.

We’ve also added language options to the Structure section of your docs site settings, allowing you to quickly and easily select the UI language for your docs site as well.

Change request descriptions

Change requests just got more powerful, with a new sidebar that lets you add a description and easily view and add reviewers.

Open the Overview sidebar in a change request and you can see its status, quickly copy a link to it, add a description and manage reviewers. The UX should be familiar to anyone who uses GitHub.

This will become especially useful with the upcoming launch of Docs Agents, but it also allows you and your team to add more context to change requests and more easily manage your review flow — especially when paired with merge rules.

Vertical alignment in column blocks

You can now vertically align content in a column block. It’s ideal for creating centered or bottom-aligned content — such as when building landing pages or adding context to an image.

Fit and fill options for card images

You can now choose more display options when it comes to card images.

Previously, images would automatically be cropped to either 16:9 or 1:1 depending on your readers’ screen size. But that meant your images could sometimes be cropped incorrectly, and portrait images would never display in full.

Now, you can choose between three options:

1. The image crops to 16:9 or 1:1 as before.

2. The image stretches to fill the entire box.

3. The image displays in full within the constraints of the box, with your primary color filling any background space.

Auto-updating translations, AI Assistant improvements and more

Introducing an all-new, super simple way to localize your docs and maintain the translations — plus smaller improvements to Assistant, better LLM-ready docs and more.

AI-powered, auto-updating translations are live

You can now automatically localize your entire docs site into 36 languages at the click of a button using our new Translations feature.

Translation uses AI to automatically translate your docs content into whichever language you choose — and will automatically update those translated versions of your docs whenever you make a change to the primary language version.

Simply choose the space you want to translate, select the source and target languages, and let AI do the rest. You can add specific instructions, such as a tone of voice or writing style, right from the modal. And you can also add a Glossary for individual languages if there are certain words or phrases that you want to be translated in a specific way across all your translations.

Once created, these translated spaces can be easily added to your docs as a variant, and any time you make a change to the original source space, the translated version of the space will auto-update following the same instructions and glossary.

That’s localization, simplified. Find out more in our docs!

GitBook Assistant improvements

After GitBook Assistant’s launch a few weeks ago, we’ve been making a bunch of small refinements to the way that it answers questions and helps your users.

First, we’ve upgraded the model, allowing for faster answers and more optimized outputs. We’ve also refined the prompt even further, which means users will get better, more accurate answers with better references.

Plus, we’ve added new auxiliary prompts to improve the quality of the recommended questions and the follow-up questions that appear in the chat after each response. You should notice that the recommended questions are shorter and more interesting, while follow-up questions will be more on-topic than before.

We’ll have some other, larger improvements for Assistant soon — including new ways to integrate it into your product. Stay tuned!

Russian language support

We’ve added an interface localization option for the Russian language in the published docs interface. When enabled in your site’s Customization menu, the interface of published docs will be translated into Russian.

Thanks to Rex Gratidian for contributing this localization. If you want to contribute to improving GitBook’s published docs, please head to our GitHub repo to find out more!

Better Markdown support for your LLM-ready docs

We’ve made a big improvement to the way our API returns Markdown for a page, so that it now outputs the content of reusable blocks and OpenAPI blocks just like other content.

This is super important, as the .md version of a URL is useful for LLM ingestion — so making sure all of your docs are LLM-friendly is vital. Now your GitBook docs are super LLM-ready, right out of the box.

Light and dark card images

You can now apply a light and dark mode image to any card — just like other images in GitBook.

To do this, open the Card options menu and choose Cover > Edit cover > Add cover for dark mode. The correct cover image will show automatically depending on the user’s settings.

We’ve also added the option to create cards that only feature a cover image. So you can remove all other fields within a card and simply show a grid of images, if you like.

A bunch of editor improvements

We’ve been working on a ton of smaller improvements across the editor, including:

• More consistently centered content within the editor across all screen sizes, to stop content moving around when you open or close different sidebars in the app.

• An improved page outline which stays sticky next to the content editor. We’ve increased the visibility conditions so you’ll see it more often, simplified its logic, and added stepper blocks to the outline so you’ll see each step listed alongside other section headers.

• We’ve fixed diff view, which wasn’t showing the diffs on some smaller screens. Now you’ll see diff markers by each block that’s changed.

• We’ve also fixed a bug that meant the comments button could be cut off on smaller screens. Now it will appear as expected, ready for you to give feedback.

GitBook Assistant, improved insights, new AI actions and more

This release introduces a supercharged new AI assistant, improved insights options, a new wider page width option that’s perfect for building landing pages, and much more.

GitBook Assistant — knowledge from your docs and beyond

As part of yesterday’s adaptive content launch we also introduced GitBook Assistant — a powerful new AI experience for your docs.

Assistant is a big step up over our previous AI search functionality. While our old solution was fast and gave end-users accurate answers based on your docs, GitBook Assistant offers a new chat-based UI, seamless integration with adaptive content, and the option to connect with MCP servers to provide better answers with more context.

As well as using agentic retrieval — which gives it a deeper understanding of user intent, and more accurate responses — it’s also integrated with adaptive content. So it can use knowledge about an individual user to give better, more tailored answers.

It can also connect to other sources via MCP servers, meaning GitBook Assistant can pull information from different sources and use that information to answer questions with even more context.

Read more in our announcement post, or head to our demo site to experience its adaptive content integration.

Time ranges and AI response rating in insights

We’ve made two big improvements to our built-in insights.

First, you can now choose time ranges when analyzing site data. So you can set custom time periods to review, or compare site data between two identical periods in any degree of separation.

Plus, you’ll now also see the ratings that users are giving your AI responses within the Insights panel — along with the question they asked and how many people asked similar things.

This is ideal for identifying common questions that are getting poorly-rated answers, so you can fill the gaps in your docs and provide better answers to your users.

Page actions

Your docs now feature a handy Page actions menu on each page, allowing your users to quickly ask GitBook Assistant a question, view or copy the page content in Markdown, or open the page in ChatGPT or Claude to pre-load a prompt.

Semantic colors in the editor

You can now use the semantic colors you define for your docs site — which are used to change the color of hint blocks and announcement banners in your docs — within the content itself.

If you’ve set semantic colors for a docs site and are editing the content of that site in a change request, you can now use the inline palette to change the text color and background to use the Primary, Info, Success, Warning or Danger colors you’ve defined for that site. These colors will sync with the semantic colors in your docs to bring everything in line.

New “Wide” page width option

We’ve added a new Wide page width option, which is perfect for creating eye-catching landing pages.

To enable the option, open the page you want to widen and open the Page options menu that appears when you hover over the page title.

There, you can set the page width to Wide, which will automatically expand all blocks that can be expanded, and align the rest of the blocks within the bigger container.

Head over to our demo site to see how it looks.

Page metadata

GitBook automatically creates page metadata — including when the page was updated and who updated it. These are both shown by default in the editor, and ‘Last updated’ also appears on published pages.

Now, you have the option to disable that metadata on a per-page basis. Open the Page options menu and in the Footer section disable the Page metadata option to hide the data from readers.

OpenAPI spec validation improvements

We’ve made some improvements to our OpenAPI specification validation process. These updates should identify issues with the spec file earlier, so your docs stay consistent and reliable for your readers.

If you’ve experienced any issues with your OpenAPI spec in GitBook, try pasting it into http://editor.swagger.io/ to check for formatting or structural problems. And if you’re still having trouble validating your spec, feel free to reach out to our support team at support@gitbook.com.

Variables, redesigned search, better diff view and more

Create and add reusable variables to your docs, plus a redesigned search experience for your published docs, and other editor improvements.

Introducing variables in GitBook

With this release we’re introducing variables.

If you repeat the same name, phrase or version number multiple times within your content, you can create a variable to help keep all those instances in sync and accurate — which is useful if you ever need to update them, or they’re complex and often mistyped.

You can create variables scoped to a specific page or a specific space, and then use them as many times as you like within a space by adding inline expressions.

For example, you might want to add variables such as:

• product_name

• version_number

• email_support

• account_type

By using variables like these, you could easily update a product name or version number across your entire docs, simply by updating the variable itself.

To view, add and edit your variables, click the Variables icon in the header bar within a change request.

You can then use a variable to your content by adding an expression. Hit / and choose Expression from the list, then double-click the expression to open up the expression editor where you can choose the variable you want to add.

Variables are super useful on their own, but become even more powerful when paired with adaptive content. We’ll talk about this combination more in the coming weeks.

Search gets a new design on docs sites

We’ve improved the search experience for published sites, with the Ask or search… bar now holding the search experience in one place, without overlapping all of your content.

Before, the search panel would sit centrally over all of your page content, blocking users from seeing it while they searched.

Now, users type directly into the search bar — which holds both the standard keyword search and the GitBook AI search experiences.

Diff view for title and description

Diff view helps you and other reviewers see what’s been edited within a change request. And now it also shows when a page’s title or description has changed!

Better breadcrumbs when editing a space

We’ve improved the breadcrumbs in the editor to make it easier for you to quickly access site settings directly from a space.

When you’re editing a published space, you can click the icon of your site in the top-left of the editor to open a new site menu.

Here, you can instantly access your main site overview, insights, customization and settings. You can also visit the site or copy the site’s URL, saving you time clicking into different parts of the GitBook app.

Not only does this make it easier to jump to important areas right from your content — it also saves space in the header — and we think it looks great, too.

Custom code fonts, make your API spec public and more

You can now upload your own custom font for code blocks, create new sites more easily, make your API spec public and more.

Set a custom monospace font for code blocks

You’ve been able to upload a custom font for your docs for a while — but now you can do the same for a monospace font for code blocks and inline code.

To change your code font, head into your site’s Customization panel and select from the Monospace font dropdown menu.

Share your OpenAPI spec from your docs

You can now choose to generate a publicly-accessible URL for your OpenAPI specification once you’ve added it to GitBook — as long as your specification is marked as public. The URL will always point to the latest version of your specification.

With GitBook hosting your spec, it’s easy to use it both to instantly generate docs, and in external OpenAPI-based tools like Stainless, Postman or others.

Head into the OpenAPI section in the GitBook sidebar and find the API you want to make public — then simply hit the toggle.

Improved notification emails

Last month we improved a few of our emails with a better design and more context about the subject — and we mentioned we’d be doing the same to more emails soon.

Well, now we have! Our emails now all use this new improved style ✨

Simplified site creation flow

When you create a new site, you’ll now see a dashboard that’s more tailored to what you want to do.

First, you’ll see four large options at the top to offer you different ways to add content to your site — including Git Sync, OpenAPI spec upload, and import options.

Below that, you’ll also see four site templates to help you get started with an all-new site faster by adding content to an established structure.

Finally, you’ll see a list of all your existing content within GitBook, along with a search bar, allowing you to quickly add existing content to your site and publish with a click.

These changes should make it easier to create an publish your site fast 🏎️💨

Performance upgrades, llms-full.txt and .md support, text alignment and more

Your docs sites load faster and support llms-full.txt and .md for LLM ingestion — plus you can now add icons to buttons, center- or right-align text on the page, and much more.

Your docs site just got faster

Over the past few weeks we’ve been slowly rolling out a new platform for our public docs. It’s faster, more performant, and it prepares us for our future plans regarding adaptive content.

The great news is that this new, improved platform is now live for everyone.

We rolled this out slowly because we handle 150 million requests on docs hosted by GitBook every day, and each one makes multiple requests to our API. The slower rollout meant we avoided downtime caused by overloading the API with requests, and means we can now optimize how we generate pages to improve loading times.

That means your users will get improved performance in your docs, and there are a few other benefits as well…

llms-full.txt and .md support for LLMs

Our new docs platform means your docs now automatically create an llms-full.txt file, which includes all of the content on your entire docs site.

llms-full.txt is a new proposed standard for making web content available in text-base formats that are easier for LLMs to process. You can access the llms-full.txt page by appending /llms-full.txt to the root URL of your docs site.

The llms-full.txt file provides a comprehensive collection of all your site’s content in Markdown formatting. With this file, you make it easier for LLMs to efficiently discover and process your documentation content.

You can also now add .md to any page’s URL in the browser to see the content of that page rendered in Markdown.

This is great for LLMs as well, which find it much easier and more efficient to process Markdown than a full HTML file with all the styling your docs site page includes.

Add icons to your inline buttons

Last month we added inline buttons to docs, and last week we added inline icons. Now, we’re combining the two!

You can now add an icon to any button you add to your docs, allowing for more customization, and helping you attract more attention to your CTAs.

Read the docs Go to top

Center align headings, paragraphs and inline items

Want to build a polished landing page, add some more structure, or even make your docs the homepage for your entire product? That’s just got easier with alignments in GitBook.

You can now align header and paragraph blocks to the left, center or right of your page, allowing for more flexibility when you’re designing your content.

Add centered titles to build a clean landing page. Right-align an image or some buttons as a CTA to read more. You can even combine alignments with our new column blocks and button icons to create variations on specific layouts you like.

Select all just got better

When you hit ⌘ + A (Mac) or Ctrl + A (Windows) to Select all within certain blocks, GitBook will now first select the contents of that block. You can hit the same keyboard shortcut again to select all the content on the page.

The blocks that use this logic are tab, stepper, code, column and hint blocks.

Column blocks, inline icons and a bunch of smaller improvements

We’ve added a new block type — columns — plus inline icons, a better site structure management experience and more.

Columns: a new way to display your content on a page

Introducing column blocks!

You can use column blocks to add two blocks on your page, side-by-side. It means you can combine two of almost any block you like alongside each other to create some powerful combinations

For example, you can combine an image, some text and a few buttons to build a nice block for a landing page. Or you could add some extra context to your code blocks, diagrams or other content within a guide or docs page.

When you add a column block, you can add content to either side of the content by hitting / and choosing the block you want to add from the palette.

You can also adjust the width of the two columns using the grabber in the centre of the block. Drag it left or right to adjust the interval of the column divider — the column widths will adjust automatically.

Add inline icons to your docs content

We’ve added a new inline element that you can use in your docs — icons!

You can now add icons anywhere on your page, giving you more options when create titles, lists and much more. Head to the docs to learn more.

A simpler way to manage your site’s structure

This week we’ve improved the Structure section of your site settings, making it easier to change settings for individual site sections.

You can now see all of your site sections and groups on the left of the menu, and click on any option to view its options. On the right-hand side, you can edit options like the section’s title, icon, description and slug.

More context when Git Sync encounters issues

Before, when Git Sync encountered an error, the message that appeared in GitBook didn’t give much context about the issue.

We’ve improved the messages — they now include more information about the error so you can solve it before you retry your sync.

New customization styles, email improvements, dark mode cover images and more

You can now add circular buttons, choose flatter design elements, and select cover images specifically for light and dark mode in GitBook.

New depth and circular corner styles in site customization

We’ve added two new style options to customization settings for your docs site.

Firstly, we’ve added a new Depth style setting in the Site styles panel, which lets you choose from two depth options. ‘Subtle’ is the default style, and adds some shadows and elevation to UI elements like buttons. The new ‘Flat’ style removes all shadows and elevation for a clean, simple look.

We’ve also added a third corner style in the same panel. Along with our existing ‘Straight’ and ‘Rounded’ options, you can now also choose ‘Circular’. This will affect UI elements such as buttons, TOC highlights, site sections and more.

Cover images get dark mode support

Your page cover images no longer have to work for both light and dark mode simultaneously. Now, when you add a cover image to a page, you can also upload a dedicated version of the image to display when your docs are viewed in dark mode.

To do this, simply hover over the cover image in the editor and open the Options menu . Here you can choose Replace image and select a new image for light or dark mode.

New notification email design

We’ve improved the design and information included in the notification emails you receive when someone comments on a space or a change request your own.

The new design includes the name of the change request or space, and the page, instantly giving you more context without needing to click through and read more.

We plan to roll out similar improvements to our other notification emails soon — stay tuned for more news on that!

Commenting improvements, link UI improvements, a new dashboard and more

We’ve made comments easier to read and use, tweaked the UX for adding and editing links, fixed some bugs and made other smaller improvements.

Comment upgrades

With this release we’ve improved the design and layout of the comments side panel. Comments take up less space, and show limited options — Resolve, Edit and Delete — by default. Clicking a comment makes it active and shows more options, including Reply and an emoji reaction.

We’ve also made the on-page highlight more visible for active comments. When you select a comment the block will be highlight in orange, making it easier to see the comment in context.

You can now also filter comments in spaces and change requests by author, so you can check on a specific person’s feedback, one at a time. Open the sidebar and use the drop-down menu at the top to select or search for a user.

Finally, we’ve made the Leave a comment section at the bottom of the side panel much smaller — giving you more room to read the existing comments. Clicking the box will expand it and show more options.

Link insert palette improvements

This week we shipped a bunch more editor improvements — including a number of upgrades and fixes focused on links.

First, the link insert palette now has better search input width, so you can see more of your search or URL when adding or editing a link. The palette also now has an empty state, so it’s easier to understand what you can do with it — and it’ll accept URL strings without needing to add www. or https:// in front of them.

If you want to edit an existing external link, clicking the Edit link button now shows the existing URL in the search palette — so you can manually amend links without needing to copy and paste it in again.

New site dashboard

We’ve been working on improving the site dashboard — particularly aimed at those creating a site for the first time. The new dashboard puts all the information about your site, including the preview, URL, status audience and structure on the left-hand side.

On the right you’ll find a number of suggested actions to help you get the most from your docs site — great for those creating a new site, or just trying to make their site the best it can be. Below that is the insights overview, which gives you a quick glance at how your site performed over the last seven days.

Global reusable content and an all-new sidebar design

You can now create reusable content and add it anywhere in your organization — plus some major sidebar improvements, bug fixes and more.

Reuse content across your entire organization

We’ve made reusable content organization-wide, so you can now add any reusable content to any page, in any space in your org.

Previously, reusable content was locked to a specific space, so you could only use it there. Global reusable content means you can keep information consistent between multiple docs sites or site sections without duplicating it and risking instances getting out of sync.

You can add reusable content from other spaces by hitting / on an empty block and scrolling to (or searching for) the Reusable content section. Here you’ll see all the reusable content from the current space, along with a new menu option that shows content from other spaces.

From there you can search through all the content in your organization to find the block you need.

Major sidebar improvements

We’ve reworked the GitBook sidebar with a new design and some big upgrades.

You’ll instantly notice that there’s more space and less clutter. The content in the sidebar is now 30% more compact, so you can see more of your content at once.

We’ve also made it resizable — so you can adjust the width to fit your workflow. Plus, we’ve added a new collapsed more to help you focus on your docs content. Drag the sidebar off the left of the screen or hit the Hide sidebar button and it will slide off the screen. It’ll pop up again when your hover your cursor to the edge of the window, then hide when you move your cursor away — so you can access everything you need without expanding and collapsing it manually.

The nav has seen improvements, too. The organization button at the top now houses your settings, theme controls, and invite options — freeing up a ton of space down at the bottom of the sidebar. And the theme controls now also offer a ‘System’ setting to match the rest of your apps.

Finally, we’ve improved the Docs sites section of the sidebar. Expand a site to see all of the sections and variants within it — complete with their icons — without any unnecessary extra nesting. So you can quickly find the sites you need, navigate to the spaces within them, and collapse the sidebar to focus on your work.

Transform paragaphs into more block types

Until now, you could only turn paragraph blocks into other kinds of basic text blocks -- H1, H2 or H3 headers.

Now, you can turn a paragraph block into all kinds of other blocks. Including:

• Headings (H1, H2, H3)

• Hint

• Unordered, ordered or task lists

• Code block

• Quote

• Tabs

• Stepper

• Expandable

This should make it easier to switch your content quickly to give it more structure or add some hierarchy.

Add inline buttons to your docs, easy block selection and more

Want to add a button to your published docs? Now you can — plus we’ve made block selection easier, and made some smaller improvements and fixes.

Add primary and secondary buttons to your docs pages

You can now add buttons to your GitBook content, meaning you can now create calls-to-action right on the page.

Here’s how buttons look when published:

Sign up Read the docs

Buttons are an inline option — like emoji, links and inline images. You can add one to any text block, and they can link to any other content within your docs, or any external URL. Simply hit / to open the inline palette and choose Button.

Buttons come in two styles — primary and secondary. In the editor they’ll appear as black or white, but in published content they’ll use your site’s primary and color to style the primary button and a derivative (typically black or white) for the secondary color.

Click and drag to select blocks

We’ve added a new way to select blocks on your page — click and drag.

Before, you could select one or more blocks by highlighting the content within them and hitting Esc. Now, we’re adding a second option that makes it simple to grab large groups of blocks in one go.

Simple click and drag your cursor across the blocks you want to select to see the selection box. Releasing the mouse button will select all the highlighted blocks, ready to be copied, deleted or turned into reusable content.

Auto-updating API reference docs, design improvements, editor updates and more

There’s a new home for your OpenAPI specification that makes generating and updating API reference docs effortless, plus a bunch of other improvements.

Create auto-updating API docs in seconds

We’ve added a new way to generate beautiful API documentation from an OpenAPI specification in seconds. The new OpenAPI section in the sidebar lets you add your spec from a URL, upload it as a file, or using the GitBook CLI.

Once added to your organization, it’s super easy to use the spec to generate OpenAPI blocks — or a complete API reference — in any space.

You can update your OpenAPI specification at any time using the GitBook UI or the CLI, regardless of how it was initially added. But if you add it using a URL, GitBook will automatically check for updates every six hours. Any changes will be pushed to your API docs right away.

You can add multiple specifications to your org if needed, so you can document all the APIs you want effortlessly. And best of all, your API docs can pull all kinds of extra content from your spec file — including page icons, page descriptions, object description, and all the endpoints.

Everything is generated from the specification, and formatted beautifully by GitBook (more on that below), with on-page testing for your users.

This is how we created our own API reference docs, so head over there to check it out. Everything in those API Reference pages is pulled from the spec.

Head to our docs to read more about this — we’ve also written a handy guide if you want to get this set up for your own organization.

Improved OpenAPI and code block designs

While working on this new API process, we’ve also been working on some visual improvements to API blocks (and code blocks) to make your docs looks better than ever.

A cleaner layout for OpenAPI blocks

We’ve tweaked the OpenAPI block’s layout to remove some unnecessary separators, and make property names bolder for clearer reading. We’ve also made property titles more consistent.

Improved OpenAPI object accordions

We’ve also reworked object accordions to make them easier to work with. The entire property is now clickable, so clicking anywhere within it will reveal its child schemas. And when you hover over a property, a button will appear to show it can be expanded.

On mobile, and other devices that don’t support hover actions, this button will always appear to make it clear that the property is expandable.

New schema alternatives separators

For schemes with alternatives, we now display a new separator. The new options include anyOf, allOf, and oneOf. The separators use string translations for different languages.

New color palette for code blocks (including high-contrast version when requested by the browser)

API blocks and code blocks have also had a color update.

In published docs, API and code blocks will now use your site’s primary, tint and semantic colors to style the code blocks. So if you’ve set all your colors to carefully follow your brand guidelines, code blocks will now reflect those colors (and the effort you’ve put into adding them).

They will also show a high-contrast version automatically when requested by a user’s browser.

These changes apply to both code blocks and OpenAPI panels that contain code, so everything will be consistent across your site.

Even more editor improvements

Following on from our last few updates, the team has continued their work across the editor to improve the performance and the user experience in the GitBook app. Here’s a quick roundup of what’s new!

All-new palette styles

We’ve refreshed the palettes in the GitBook app. They are now more in line with the other UI elements and generally look a little nicer.

The change has been rolled out to all the menus in the app, and we’re working on improving the UX of some of these palettes too.

We’ve started with the link palette. It previously showed all the linkable content in your organization in one long list, which could make results tricky to find. Now, different content is separated by titles, so it’s easier to see other section on the current page, other pages in the same space, other spaces and users.

We’ve also made the inline palette searchable. So if you want to add an inline image, emoji, link or Math & TeX, you can now search the menu with your keyboard rather than needing to use your cursor or the up/down arrow keys.

Icons for relative links

Relative links — aka links to other pages within your docs — will now display that content’s icon or emoji next to the space/page title in the editor. Before they’d show a space, page or anchor link icon. Now they’ll use the icon you’ve selected for the link target.

A bunch of smaller improvements

• We’ve improved the way that the GitBook editor handles images in image blocks. Now we’ll automatically resized the version that displays within the editor, making the loading times faster and editing smoother. Plus, if you have more than one image in a single image block, you can now drag and drop them horizontally to reorder them.

• We’ve made a few small tweaks to the UI for table and card blocks. Specifically, GitBook now hides the Options menu for blocks within a table or card, so they only appear when you hover near the block. We’ve also changed the padding for the buttons, as they were previously getting cut off within cards.

• We’ve improved tab blocks — specifically linking to specific tabs within a tab block. Before, clicking an anchor link to a tab on the same page would open it in a new browser tab/window. You can also make tab blocks full width, giving you more room if you want to create tabs with lots of tab items or long headings.

• You can now use subscript and superscript formatting options — just highlight your text and choose the new options from the inline palette! So now you can write things like H₂O and 16^th, if you want.

Link tooltips, even more editor improvements, and some bug fixes

Work continues on giving you the best editor experience possible, and we’ve added new tooltips to links in published docs to give readers extra context before they click.

Link tooltips

We’ve added an upgrade to links in published content. You can now hover over any link on your page and after a moment you’ll see a preview of the page, URL or site section it takes you to — making it easier to see the context of the link without clicking it.

Of course, you can open the link as normal by simply clicking. But the new tooltip adds some context if a user isn’t sure whether they want to visit the page.

The tooltip also contains breadcrumbs to show the location of the page in your docs — and these are clickable so you can easily navigate through your content if needed. Plus, there’s a new button in the tooltip that lets users open the link in a new tab.

You’ll also notice a small arrow ↗︎ on external links, to give users an indication that they’ll be taken to an external location on click.

More editor improvements

As part of our ongoing effort to improve and fix some things in the editor, here are some more updates that have shipped this week:

Making images easier to work with

We’ve made a bunch of improvements to the image viewer in the editor. When you click an image, you’ll now see it above the editor — rather than on a black background — helping maintain some context in your browser.

Plus, the Next and Previous buttons that appeared in image galleries properly display as inactive when you reach the end of the gallery. And when you’re viewing an image, click anywhere will now close the viewer.

Finally, if an image shows a Could not load image error, you’ll now see a Select new image button in the image block, to make it easier to replace with an image from the FIles menu.

New card controls

Following on from our recent table improvements, we’ve also brought some of the same improvements to card blocks.

Firstly, for ‘Select’ entries, you can now create new selectable items right from the selection menu — by simply typing your option and choosing Add….

You can also now rename a field’s name from the edit modal, and we’ve improved the spacing in the modal to make it nicer to use. We’ve also fixed the block’s selection border, which was misaligned in a way that we suspect was driving detail-oriented people crazy.

Expandable block improvements

The work to improve expandable blocks continues! You can now add image blocks within expandable blocks, giving you the option add wider images and move images around more easily.

This week we’ve also fixed the formatting keyboard shortcuts, which worked inconsistently while editing text or adding links. They should now work every time. You should also notice that selecting a link will always open the link palette — something that was a little unpredictable before.

New and improved tables, announcement banners, custom fonts and more

Huge table improvements and custom fonts for published sites lead the way this week — which also marks GitBook’s 11th birthday! 🎉

New and improved tables

We’ve completely overhauled table blocks in GitBook to make them more functional and predictable. While they may look similar in the editor, they’ve been totally reworked in the backend to improve performance and make them more practical as a block.

Tables now feature placeholders to make it easier to insert new rows and columns. We’ve also made reordering columns easier when your have wide tables that scroll to show more content.

And, following on from our recent work on card blocks, we’ve also improved the empty states for some cells to make it easier to complete actions, such as adding a file to a files cell.

Plus, if you have a table column using the Select option, you can now add new selection options from the table without opening a modal. Simply type your option and click Add… in the modal.

We’ve also got a new UX for column resizing, and an improved UI for reordering rows and columns by dragging-and-dropping. You can also reorder columns by hitting Enter or Space and then use the arrow keys to reorder them.

Plus we’ve made a bunch of other smaller improvements that improve the usability of tables across the board.

Overall this represents a huge upgrade for tables, making them much easier to use and interact with in the editor. As with any major rework, if you spot anything that’s not working as you expect, reach out to support or report it directly in our GitHub community.

Add announcement banners to published docs

Need to tell users about a product update, time-sensitive announcement or new marketing push? You can now add an announcement banner to the top of your docs site with an icon, text and a link CTA — just like we have right now on this page. Side note: you should fill out the State of Docs survey 😁

Head to our docs to find out how to add a custom announcement banner to your docs — including how to customize their color and icon.

Use custom fonts on your docs site

You can now upload your own custom font for your docs site, so your site accurately matches your brand’s style guide.

Right now GitBook supports .woff and .woff2 file formats. Take a look at to our docs to read more about how to add a custom font to your site. Custom fonts are available for Ultimate sites — head to our pricing page to find out more.

Breadcrumbs in search results

When you use search on a published docs site, you’ll now see breadcrumbs for section groups, sections and variants in the search results. Previously the results would only show one, which could be confusing if the result was in a site variant within a site section.

A ton of editor improvements, bug fixes and more

A dedicated team has been working hard on making some editor improvements and fixes to improve the overall editing experience in GitBook.

A ton of editor upgrades

We’ve had a squad dedicated to improving and fixing some things in the editor for the past week or two. Here’s a quick breakdown of everything they’ve shipped:

Link hover menu improvements

Last week the team redesigned the link hover menu to make it easier to open, edit, copy and remove links from text in the editor. This week they’ve also tweaked the timing for the menu opening and closing. It was previously appearing to quickly and closing too slowly, which could lead to overlaps if several links were hovered in quick succession. The timing has been tweaked to make everything feel slightly better.

Improved menu heights

When you opened the the Insert menu and Options menu near the bottom of a window, the height of the menus was previously quite small. Now, it’ll open at full height, making it easier to scroll and select the option you need.

Toggle the TOC more easily

The Toggle table of contents button is now easier to access. It’ll appear when you hover your cursor over the TOC, and remains visible when the TOC is collapsed making it easier to find again if needed.

Options and dragging for empty blocks

We’ve added the Options button to empty blocks. So now you can easily drag and drop empty blocks around on the page — or open the options menu with a click.

Keyboard navigation out of menus

When you use / or @ in the editor, it opens up a context menu for inline content or an @ mention for another user. Now, you can press the right and left arrow keys on your keyboard to move the cursor around on the page, or hit Esc to close the menu.

Spacing improvements

We made some small tweaks to spacing in the editor, particularly to bring list blocks closer to the paragraph above them — which should make lists following text feel more natural.

A new search bar style, better link editing, plus small improvements and fixes

We’ve added a new way to display your search bar, made it easier to edit or copy links in the editor, and made a big bunch of other improvements and fixes.

Search bar styles for published docs

There are now two search styles available for your published docs — Subtle and Prominent.

Subtle matches our existing style, with a small search bar in the top-right corner of the screen. Prominent moves the search bar to a central location in your site header, and makes the bar itself slightly wider.

You can change your search style in your site’s Customization screen. Head to the Layout tab and you can switch between the two styles using the dropdown in the Header section.

An easier way to edit and manage links

This release brings a better hover menu for links in the editor. The new menu makes it easier to open a link by clicking the URL below the text, and adds buttons to edit, copy and remove the link.

New link styles, broken URL insights, a new integration and more

We’ve added a new customization option, a new way to view external links pointing to nonexistent pages in your docs so you can fix them, and a bunch of smaller improvements and fixes.

Change your link style

You can now switch between two link design styles for your published content — Default or Accent.

Default uses the existing design, with your links highlighted in your primary or tint color. Accent will simply add a colored underline to the link, with the text itself remaining the same color as the rest of your content.

This is the latest design update, following on from the new hint blocks and revamped customization options we’ve released in the last few weeks.

Track URLs generating ‘Page not found’ errors

We’ve added a new Broken URLs section to your site’s Insights page. It shows any incoming links from external sources that are resulting in a ‘Page not found’ error. These may be incorrectly-inputted URLs, outdated links with no redirects, or spam links.

You can combine this with site redirects to point people looking for information in the right direction.

And if you want to check the source of the broken URLs, you can head to the main Traffic insight section, filter by ‘Page: not found’ and scroll down to the Referrers section to see the source of the links.

New Gurubase integration

We’ve just added Gurubase to our list of GitBook integrations — so you can now add an AI-powered Gurubase chat widget to your documentation. The integration enables real-time AI assistance for your readers directly within your documentation pages.

New and improved hint blocks

You can now add titles to hint blocks and customize their colors for published content, plus we’ve released a number of other smaller improvements.

New hint block design and colors

We’re redesigned our hint blocks to give you more options when creating your docs.

The new blocks now use a smaller font size, and you have the option to add headings to them, which will appear in a colored bar at the top of the hint. To do this, simply add a heading block as the first block inside the hint block.

If you’re publishing your content on a docs site, you can also customize the colors of your hint blocks however you like. To do this, head to your site’s Customization menu and scroll down in the General tab until you see Semantic colors.

Here, you can set the colors for Info, Success, Warning and Danger. Once you hit Save, the hint blocks in your published content will update with those chosen colors.

Powerful new themes, site section groups and more

We’ve added some incredible new customization options for your docs site, including new theming options and site section groups that let you create a nav with drop-down menus.

New themes to modernize your docs site

We’ve just released a new set of themes that make it easier to design an incredible-looking, branded docs site ✨

These are different from the old themes as they apply to the whole site — from the background and header, down to individual elements and icons.

There are four new themes

• Clean – A modern theme featuring translucency and minimally-styled elements. Clean is available for all sites, and is the new default theme.

• Muted – A sophisticated theme with decreased contrast between elements. Muted is available for all sites. If your site previously used the Default header theme with background tinting enabled, it will now use this theme.

• Bold – A high-impact theme with prominent colors and strong contrasts. Bold is available on Premium sites. If your site used the Bold, Contrast or Custom header themes, it will now use this theme.

• Gradient – A trendsetting theme featuring a gradient background and splashes of color. Gradient is available on Premium sites, and is completely new!

These four themes can be combined with any of our other customization options — such as tints, sidebar and list styles, corner styles, and more.

The updated Customization menu also makes it easy to add a tint that compliments your theme perfectly. You’ll see some suggested colors based on your primary color selection, and you can select one with a click to preview it in the menu. You can also simply select your primary color as your tint, or a completely custom color — the choice is yours.

Head into your docs site’s Customization menu to explore your options, and head to our docs to find out more.

Create more structure with site section groups

A few months ago we announced site sections — a new way to add content from multiple spaces to a single site, with tabs along the top to switch between each section.

Today, we’re building on top of that with section groups. As the name suggestions, section groups let you group up a number of sections in a drop-down menu that appears next to other sections in that top bar.

That means you can create a top navigation bar with clickable groups and drop-down menus containing links to other pages, right in your docs site.

You can give your section group a name and icon, and even add descriptions to the sections within them — which will appear below them in the menu — if you want.

You can manage all of this from your site’s Settings tab, in the Structure section.

An all-new preview, better OpenAPI blocks and more

We’ve given your site preview a big upgrade with extra options, improved our OpenAPI blocks, added some new integrations, and more.

A new way to preview your site

You can now use the Preview tab in a change request or your site’s dashboard to see how your site looks with the changes you’ve applied.

It also lets you easily switch between the light and dark mode of your site, and also view it on desktop and mobile sized viewports — all in one place.

Improved OpenAPI blocks

We’ve updated the design of OpenAPI blocks in GitBook. They’re now cleaner and easier to navigate, with a refreshed design. We’ve also improved the appearance of the Test it section, to make it clearer and more obvious in the interface.

This is just the first improvement in a bunch of upcoming improvements to API documentation in GitBook. Stay tuned — we’ll have more to share soon.

New Hexus and letmeexplain integrations

We’ve just released new Hexus and letmeexplain integrations in GitBook.

The Hexus integration lets you embed interactive Hexus product demos, walkthroughs, and how-to guides directly into your Gitbook pages for easy access and visualization.

Meanwhile, the letmeexplain integration allows you to display the letmeexplain chat widget on your public documentation to connect and interact with your readers.

Completely revamped insights, a better header bar and more

We just shipped a huge improvement to your site insights, along with a new header bar to make space and site management easier.

A huge upgrade for site insights

We’ve just shipped an enormous update for site insights. It now offers a lot more data points, new visualizations, and a whole new section to make it easier than ever to track your docs site’s effectiveness.

First, insights now live in their own dedicated tab in your site’s dashboard. You can see a top-level overview of your insights on your main dashboard page, with a globe that shows recent views in the last hour by location.

Click into the Insights tab and you’ll get tons more information about your site analytics. You can see traffic, popular pages, user feedback, search and Ask AI data, and data about how users are using any OpenAPI endpoints you’ve added to your docs.

You’ll see a graph on each page to visualize the data, and can add filters or group your data to view specific ways. For example, you could look at search data for a specific site section, or filter your traffic data by country, device, browser and more.

By combining these filters and groups, you can drill down in to precise analytics data to track the events that you are important to you. And because our insights data is on-site, straight from the source, they’re incredibly accurate.

The new insights are available now — although the Links and OpenAPI sections are only available on Premium and Ultimate sites.

An all new space and site header

You probably noticed that the header bar in the GitBook app has changed this week, with new features and a more compact design.

The new header combines the old header and sub-nav bars into one, and makes it easier to switch between different functions whether you’re in a space or managing your docs sites. The bar’s layout stays consistent across spaces, change requests and sites — while individual controls will change to show what’s relevant.

Tabs make it easy to switch between different views, which is particularly useful in change requests — where you can quickly view changes or preview your edited content. It’s also great in your docs site dashboard, as it makes it easier than ever to switch between customizations, insights, settings and more.

Improved site colors and tints

We’ve just released a substantial change to the way we generate color palettes in docs sites:

• A better color palette based on your chosen colors We now define color in terms of perceived LCH instead of RGB values. And we assign a function to each of the shades in the palette, so colors are used more consistently and always work well with each other.

• Better color accessibility – Thanks to guaranteed accessible color contrasts, your colors will be more accessible no matter which values you use.

• An upgrade for tint color – When enabled, the tint color of your site now tints every single element on the page, rather than just the background.

You may notice some small visual changes across your site, but they will be minimal. If you have enabled the new Tint setting in your site’s Customization section and selected a strong primary color, you’ll see a more pronounced change. You can see the changes on your site right now.

• If you enjoy the bold look, then set (or keep) your tint color to your primary color or another strong color. We’ll mix in that color everywhere and it’ll stay vibrant in places where it can be.

• If you’d rather tone it down a little, then try setting your tint color to a desaturated shade. It’ll contrast with your primary color in a more subtle way.

/llms.txt support, improved sitemapping and more

All GitBook sites now automatically generate an /llms.txt file to make it easier for large language models to process your site data.

llms.txt support for published content

We’ve just added support for /llms.txt for your published docs. That means that GitBook will now automatically generate and host a plain text version of your docs, to make it easier for large language models to process.

You can find this file by simply adding /llms.txt at the end of your docs site’s URL. For example, you can check out the version generated for our docs at https://gitbook.com/docs/llms.txt.

This follows a proposition from Jeremy Howard, Co-founder of Answer.AI, to use the llms.txt file format as a standard to help LLMs gather information from a website at inference time, without needing to parse HTML, JavaScript or ads.

Improved sitemap support

We’ve improved our sitemap support for your published site. Now, all indexable pages in your site are listed in the sourcemap, with one sitemap for each published space. That means all your site sections and variants include all the pages within them in the sitemap.

A better site footer, clearer cards, keyboard formatting and more

This week we’ve made visual improvements to your site’s footer, added placeholders to empty card fields, add keyboard formatting options, and more.

Footer improvements

We’ve shipped a number of improvements to the footer, which all add up to a cleaner and more adaptive look for the bottom of your page.

• The footer now allows for more than four groups of links, so you’ll soon be able to add many more groups and GitBook will automatically organize them in a neat grid.

• We’ve increase the footer logo size to allow for wider logos. If your site already used a wider logo, you’ll notice that it now displays larger and fits better on the page.

• We’ve also improved the layout of the footer, so that your links and the copyright notice align perfectly with your page content.

These changes are all live now, and your site footer should have updated automatically.

More card improvements

We’ve been making a number of improvements to cards over the last few weeks, and that continues this week. Here are the latest updates:

• You’ll now see placeholders on any card with empty text and number fields to show that data is needed in those slots. Other empty card elements also now show buttons that prompt you to add links, files, users or a multi-selection with a click.

• We’ve also improved the alert tooltip that appears when you insert a non-numeric value into a number field. It’ll simply notify you that the content of the field needs to be a number.

• We’ve update the default content of a card block. Previously new card blocks featured three cards, each with three empty fields. We’ve updated this, so the default for a card block to be one card with one line of text, and a placeholder next to it to add more.

Keyboard formatting in the GitBook app

You can now add keyboard formatting to any text in GitBook — perfect for writing keyboard shortcuts in your docs. For example, you could tell people that they can hit ⌘+/ or Ctrl+/ to open a block’s Options menu in GitBook, if you really wanted to.

To add keyboard formatting, highlight the text you want to format and choose the Keyboard option from the inline palette.

Easily revert site customization overrides

When you’re customizing a docs site with multiple site sections or variants, you can easily set site-wide customizations. But you can also override customization settings for specific sections or variants, if you want.

Previously, once you changed something at a section or variant level that override couldn’t be reset. Now, we’ve added a button that let’s you reset any overrides back to the site-wide settings, so you can quickly align all your site spaces once again.

A big upgrade for docs site TOCs, plus better tables and emojis

We’ve added more customization options for the table of contents, plus a new alignment setting for tables and an emoji update in the GitBook app.

Big upgrades for your docs site’s table of contents

Today we’ve released a number of new customization options and improvements to TOCs in published documentation. Here’s what’s new:

• Background styles – You can now select the new Filled table of contents style to visually separate your navigation from your content. It will automatically adapt to your site’s background color for both light and dark mode. The default style remains the same for all sites.

• List styles – Change the style of list items in both the TOC and the On this page section on the right. Use Pill for a cleaner look, or Line to appear more technical. The default style remains the same for all sites, but as the On this page section now uses the same style, it might look slightly different from what you’re used to.

• Vertical site sections – If you have disabled the header on your site but you’ve created multiple site sections, those sections will now be displayed as a vertical list at the top of the table of contents. When there are more than five sections, the list will scroll. The horizontal tabs remain the default for all sites with a header, although vertical sections will be an option for all sites in the future.

• Moved variant dropdown – With all the changes above, the variant dropdown felt more at home at the top of the table of contents. We made sure that its behaviour is as close to the current behaviour — it remains sticky at the top of the TOC, so is always available. If you have variants on your site, you should see the variant selector in its new position already.

Vertical alignment in tables

You could already set the horizontal alignment of cells in table blocks — and now you can also set vertical alignment per column. Hover over the column header and open the Options menu , then choose Vertical alignment and the alignment you want.

In-app emoji update

We’ve now updated our emoji within the GitBook app to display as Apple Emoji on Apple devices, and Google’s Noto Color Emoji for non-Apple devices.

This follows last week’s update to change the same emoji for published content to make them more accessible across all browsers.

Ask AI insights, TOC improvements, an emoji update and more

You can now see insights into what your users are asking in your docs, we’ve made some small improvements to the table of contents, and fixed a few bugs.

Ask AI insights

You can now see insights for the way that your site visitors are using Ask AI in your docs. It’ll show the most popular questions that users are asking, so you can analyze popular topics and write more content to address them if needed.

You’ll find the tool in your site’s dashboard with your other site insights. Scroll down to the bottom of your dashboard to see them on the left-hand side.

In-app table of contents improvements

We’ve made a number of small improvements to the table of contents in the editor to make it easier to work with pages in your space:

• Reduced the opacity of pages as you drag them to make it easier to see the content behind them.

• Increased the size of the drop zone when you drag and drop pages to make it easier to move them to the right place.

• Reduced the size of and moved the Add page + button that appears when you hover between pages button to the left of the line, so they don’t obstruct any page titles

More familiar emojis

We’ve updated the emojis in published content. They’ll now display as Apple Emoji on Apple devices, and Google’s Noto Color Emoji if the user is not on an Apple device.

Our previous emoji library wasn’t accessible across all browsers, so we’ve switched them to give your users a more consistent experience.

We’ll soon update the emojis within the app to use these same sets so you can see an accurate representation of your published content.