What is llms-full.txt?

llms-full.txt isn't defined by the llms.txt proposal. We read the v2 text and its Changes page (llmstxt.org, changes), and neither mentions llms-full.txt. It's a convention that grew up around the proposal, mainly on documentation platforms.

The difference in one line

• llms.txt: a short index of links. The detail "lives behind the links, and is fetched only when needed" (llmstxt.org).
• llms-full.txt (convention): the content itself, pasted into one big file.

Who serves it (verified)

• Mintlify hosts one automatically: it "combines your entire documentation site into a single file… Each page appears as its title, source URL, description, and full Markdown content." It also serves both files at /.well-known/ paths, and it caps generated llms.txt indexes (not llms-full.txt) at 100,000 characters. (Mintlify docs) Their own file was 1,664,050 bytes when we fetched it (07:00 EDT).
• Shopify serves /llms-full.txt, mirroring /agents.md by default, and you can override it with llms-full.txt.liquid (shopify.dev).
• Not everyone serves one. Our fetches got 404s for docs.stripe.com/llms-full.txt and fastht.ml/docs/llms-full.txt, even though both sites publish llms.txt.

The older "llms-ctx" files

The original v1 proposal described llms_txt2ctx, a tool that expanded llms.txt into a context file. llmstxt.org still serves llms-ctx-full.txt (16,955 bytes, XML-like <project> wrapper), and FastHTML serves one at /docs/llms-ctx-full.txt (359,752 bytes). v2 says "The context-expansion tooling is no longer part of the proposal."

Should you make one?

Honest trade-offs (our view):

• Maybe yes if you're a docs site and users paste your docs into chat tools, since one file is convenient.
• Probably not for a small business site. Your llms.txt plus readable pages already do the job.
• Size cuts both ways. A 1.6 MB file is likely too big for many context windows (our estimate), which is the problem the index approach was meant to solve.
• Keeping it fresh is the cost. A stale full dump is worse than none. Generate it in your build rather than by hand.

Checking one

Our checker applies llms.txt format rules (H1, sections, links). A full-content file is mostly prose, so expect "suggestions" rather than errors. Files over 1 MB are rejected by our tool (our limit, not a spec rule). For the index file, use the checker or generator.

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Guide draft: not indexed until Legal clears it.