Fern

Recently shipped SSO role-based access control and opt-in PII masking for Ask Fern, plus new preview-as-role and external sitemap indexing features.

Auth and security hardened. DDoS protections now cover all docs instances with adaptive rate limiting, IP filtering, request validation, and monitoring. SSO supports role-based access control — Fern reads roles from the identity provider's token and applies roles and viewers rules from docs.yml. Teams can now preview a role-gated docs site as a specific viewer, including nav pruning and gated blocks, to validate gating before publishing.

Ask Fern now speaks 15+ languages and masks PII. The chat interface and document indexing support Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and Mandarin. Opt-in PII masking redacts emails, phone numbers, SSNs, and credit card numbers in the browser before they leave the device.

Performance improved across docs sites. The API Explorer loads 40% faster with optimized payload handling and caching. Images are automatically optimized and lazy-loaded, reducing initial page load. Search indexing is up to 40% faster with better result relevance.

Changelogs and tables got new layouts. Changelogs support timeline (compact, date-grouped) and classic (full entries) layouts, with per-changelog overrides in frontmatter. Table components now have sortable columns, sticky headers, and improved mobile responsiveness.

Search can now index external sitemaps — list one or more external sitemap.xml files under the experimental external-sitemaps key, and Fern indexes their pages into the same search index as your documentation. External results are flagged as third-party and open in a new tab. Availability badges (Beta, Deprecated, etc.) in the sidebar are now opt-in via layout.show-nav-availability-badges: true in docs.yml.

Webhook reference pages gained request/response examples and improved schema visualization.

The fern-docs agent skill shipped for Claude Code, Cursor, and Copilot, with an install button in the page action bar.