Cloudinary
NOMINEE OVERVIEW
The Cloudinary Doc Portal is the self-service hub for developers and agents building media-rich experiences with Cloudinary. It brings together docs for Cloudinary’s flagship Image and Video API products alongside Cloudinary Assets, MediaFlows, Moderation and Integrations docs, that together help organizations of all sizes to upload, manage, transform, optimize, analyze, and deliver media.
The portal is designed around the reality that Cloudinary offers several products with different use cases, and audiences. Each major product has its own top-level navigation, dedicated sub-navigation, and content tailored to its users.
Developers can choose the learning path that works best for them, from guides, SDK docs for 19 languages and frameworks, sample apps, Postman collections, and video tutorials to AI-native tools.
The portal is built for both people and AI agents in mind:
- Findability. Developers can use fast, filterable search when they know what they need, or ask questions in natural language through our multilingual Ask AI assistant. We review anonymized Ask AI conversations to identify content gaps and continuously improve how both people and AI agents consume our documentation.
- Use-case docs. Cloudinary Docs go far beyond API reference and basic feature instructions. We pair feature-based documentation with in-depth use-case guides and real-life code examples. These resources explain not only what each capability does and how to implement it, but also when and why to use it, and which related features and products can help teams get the most ROI from Cloudinary.
- AI workflows. Every page and product area is available as Markdown, through `llms.txt` indexes, always serving Markdown to agents via `Accept` headers. This is not a basic HTML-to-Markdown conversion: the Markdown version includes agent-specific guidance, including additional instructions or formatting designed specifically for AI consumption. For example, rather than a 1:1 conversion of our doc home page, our \index.md\ page covers how an agent should discover and navigate the portal.
- Agentic Doc Skill. The cloudinary-documentation SKILL references our production documentation indexes with added instructions that help AI coding assistants use the skill much like they would use a documentation MCP server, but with a simpler setup.
The Cloudinary Doc Portal turns its rich media platform into a clear, inclusive path from initial discovery to confident implementation and growth, giving developers and their AI agents the context and tools to successfully build the right media experience for their customers.
NOMINATION RATIONALE
1) BEST REIMAGINED ONBOARDING EXPERIENCE IN A DEVELOPER PORTAL
Why is this category a strong match?
While developers increasingly discover, configure, and use libraries through AI coding assistants, most developer docs still begin with manual onboarding instructions. Cloudinary saw that this no longer reflects how many developers want to work and created an onboarding experience that meets them in their dev environment.
Cloudinary’s carefully designed and tested AI Power Start prompt turns any new or existing coding project into a Cloudinary-ready one. The developer pastes the prompt into their preferred AI coding assistant, and the prompt guides it to detect the project stack, select, install, and configure the relevant Cloudinary SDK, help securely define credentials, install Cloudinary MCP servers and agent skills that support future Cloudinary development, and verify that setup works.
The experience then continues with contextual prompts that help the developer begin building the image, video, upload, optimization, or other Cloudinary capability that meets their needs.
This is not simply documentation made available to an LLM. It’s an onboarding flow designed for the AI-native developer workflow: adaptive to the developer’s project, guarded by confirmation gates, and structured to establish both a first successful integration and confidence in what comes next.
Cloudinary also preserves strong non-AI onboarding paths. Developers who prefer a hands-on first integration can still our use language-specific SDK Quick Starts to create a runnable project and make their first API calls in five minutes or less, alongside video tutorials and comprehensive sample apps.
By offering both an AI-native fast path and proven hands-on learning paths, Cloudinary lets developers choose the way of getting started that best fits how they work today.
In what ways does your portal shine in this category?
The AI Power Start prompt removes the work of translating generic setup instructions into the specifics of an individual codebase. It automatically detects the project stack and sets up the relevant Cloudinary SDK and resources.
The journey is staged and safe. The AI assistant asks for confirmation at each stage, skips anything already configured, and guides credential setup without exposing secrets. The prompt then verifies that the integration is genuinely working by transforming and optimizing a sample image, measuring the savings, and displaying a working preview.
The result is more than a package installation or first successful API call. The prompt installs Cloudinary MCP servers and agent skills, giving the developer’s AI assistant ongoing Cloudinary context and capabilities. These tools continue to help developers discover relevant features and implement them using recommended patterns.
The AI Power Start doc page introduces this experience. From there, developers can copy the primary prompt, learn what it will do before running it, and return after setup to explore tested, copyable prompts for deeper common use cases, helping them get from a working integration to useful implementation on day 1.
Cloudinary also supports developers who prefer to learn independently with proven SDK Quick Starts, video tutorials, and sample apps alongside the AI-native path. Video tutorial transcripts in multiple languages broaden access. Together, these options let developers choose the path that helps them become productive and confident most quickly.
