Your company provides a recommendation engine for retail customers. You are providing retail customers with an API where they can submit a user ID and the API returns a list of recommendations for that user. You are responsible for the API lifecycle and want to ensure stability for your customers in case the API makes backward-incompatible changes. You want to follow Google-recommended practices. What should you do?

A versioning strategy that increases the version number for backward-incompatible changes is a Google-recommended practice for API lifecycle management. This allows customers to continue using older, compatible versions while providing a clear path for migration to new versions. This approach ensures stability and predictability for API consumers. Informing customers via a distribution list is a good communication practice but doesn't inherently prevent breaking changes or provide a technical solution for stability. Automated documentation is also a good practice for clarity but doesn't address backward compatibility directly. Suffixing "DEPRECATED" to the current version number for a backward-incompatible change is confusing and doesn't provide a distinct, stable endpoint for the new, incompatible version.