How APIs get found, documented, catalogued, and understood — by humans and increasingly by machines.
You need the things a portal provides — docs, signup, keys, plans, support, status, change log — in one findable place. Whether that is a product or a static site matters far less than whether it exists and is current.
Generate everything you can from the contract, keep the prose in version control next to the code, and test the examples in CI. Documentation maintained separately from the API will always drift.
Publish machine-readable pointers on your own domain — an OpenAPI at a stable URL, an APIs.json index, an llms.txt — get listed where people already look, and make sure a search engine can read your docs.
List where your buyers already procure — the cloud marketplaces are the ones that reliably move real money. Treat marketplaces as a channel, not as a substitute for your own developer experience.
Interactive reference generated from your OpenAPI, a getting-started path to a first successful call, real working examples, error documentation, and a change log. Generated reference alone is not documentation.
Because it is not primarily a technical problem. The formats exist and work; the incentives do not — the effort falls on providers while the benefit accrues to the ecosystem.
