Expo Shares 12 AEO Best Practices for Making Docs Readable by AI Agents

Expo's documentation team has outlined 12 Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) best practices after observing that AI coding agents increasingly fetch and act on documentation without ever rendering it in a browser. The shift began in January 2025 when Expo added support for llms.txt, a curated plain-text file designed to help AI agents navigate documentation more effectively. Unlike traditional SEO, which optimizes content for search engine rankings and human clicks, AEO focuses on ensuring AI systems can retrieve and accurately reproduce the correct information. The team notes that for documentation sites, the stakes are especially high since a code sample reproduced incorrectly by an agent simply will not compile. Expo's practices target the retrieval path — where agents fetch live pages in real time — since that is the channel documentation maintainers can actually influence.