This is a known problem and we’re working on it (see below) along with some community contributions.
Much of the work will be focused on documentation structure and infrastructure (particularly, what is known as an information architecture), aiming to provide a common information architecture that all projects can build on. We will also be putting funding into improving the searchability of documentation (both via external search engines and internally), the usability of the documentation when used via LLM-powered agents, and supporting structured “learning pathways” through a project’s documentation.
That work just kicked off in late July so there are no updates at this time.
What’s really frustrating for us is that we have very little control over the results that appear in search engines or in LLM models, yet we are often the ones getting blamed for their poor performance. Additionally, forks of the ROS documentation (as opposed to mirrors) and independent translation efforts (as opposed to addressing translations in the canonical documentation) are probably exacerbating this problem.
All of this is too say we always need contributors to the ROS 2 Documentation, especially from individuals who have experience improving SEO. There’s also a lot of work still to do to improve package-level documentation and tooling available for ROS Index (huge shout out to @rkent for his on-going work in this direction). As @rkent can attest we also really need more contributors and reviewers on that front.
If this is something you are passionate about and you would like to have a HUGE positive impact on the ROS community our documentation crew could really use your help.