How Cloudflare's Docs Team Uses Its Own Products to Find Doc Gaps
Cloudflare has long been vocal about "dogfooding"—using its own products internally. The security team runs on Cloudflare's security tools, product teams build on Workers and Durable Objects, and, more recently, the documentation team migrated its site to the Pages platform. But the docs team's dogfooding goes further than hosting. They also manage the Cloudflare settings for developers.cloudflare.com, giving them a direct hand in the platform's behavior and an unusually visceral view of what users experience.
That operational responsibility means docs writers are not just writing instructions—they are living them. For example, the team has used the product to set up rules for SEO and visitor experience, enable bot protection, analyze site traffic to determine needed redirects, and configure Cloudflare Tunnels for pre-release reviews. This hands-on exposure often surfaces documentation problems that might otherwise go unnoticed. Setting up an internal tool, breaking it with bot management settings, or spending hours crafting a Transform Rule only to realize a Forwarding Page Rule was required—these are the kinds of first-hand lessons that lead to better docs. The team has made direct improvements from this process, such as adding a page to the 1.1.1.1 docs on how to verify setup at the device level, and enhancing Cloudflare Tunnel docs based on real usage experience.
Beyond personal experience, the team relies on quantitative signals to find content gaps. One of the most effective is internal search data. When users search within the docs and leave to view pages on other Cloudflare properties—Community, Learning Center, and so on—the docs team checks whether that destination page conceptually belongs in the official docs. This method has led to creating new pages for topics like subdomain records and Cloudflare Ray IDs.
External search data serves a similar purpose but from the opposite direction: examining which keywords bring users into Cloudflare content domains and where they land. This analysis recently highlighted confusion between Bulk Redirects and Forwarding Page Rules. Although Bulk Redirects is the easier and more flexible way to forward URLs, few searches for "url forwarding" ended up on the Bulk Redirects page. The docs team responded by tweaking keywords and adding a section to the Forwarding Page Rules article to explicitly spell out the difference between the two features.
While internal and external search data are the most actionable inputs, the team also tracks broader metrics like pageviews, support tickets, and the cost of maintaining different sections of the docs. These metrics don't directly measure doc quality—a spike in DNS doc traffic could mean the docs are helpful, or it could simply reflect a blog post about a new feature. But they do help the team weigh relative effort. DNS docs, for instance, generate a high volume of support tickets but represent a small portion of the overall content. If opportunities arise to strengthen that section, they are likely to get high priority.
Combining hands-on experience, search analytics, community feedback, and usage metrics lets the docs team treat documentation as a product—continuously refined based on evidence rather than guesses about what users might need.
