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§ 1.6.3 ARTICLE

llms.txt · the expanded variant

llms-full.txt on Squarespace

The base llms.txt spec1 does not define llms-full.txt. The expanded variant emerged as a community convention — Anthropic2 and Perplexity3 both publish one for their developer documentation. The pattern: the standard /llms.txt is a curated index, and /llms-full.txt is the same site as one large markdown file with the body text included. Useful for documentation-heavy sites. Overkill for most service businesses.

The Squarespace install path is identical to the base install on the hub — a page at /llms-full plus a URL Mapping that bridges /llms-full.txt to it. The decision worth your attention is not how, but whether.

What llms-full.txt actually is

llms-full.txt is the same idea as llms.txt — a markdown file at a canonical URL listing what an AI engine should read — except it includes the body content of every listed page, not just the links. The spec on llmstxt.org does not define it. The convention was introduced by FastHTML as llms-ctx-full.txt, generalised to llms-full.txt, and adopted by Anthropic and Perplexity for their developer docs. Both sites publish llms.txt as the index and llms-full.txt as the full markdown corpus.

The audience for the expanded variant is narrow: IDE coding assistants and MCP-server integrations that want to load a full documentation set in one fetch instead of crawling page by page. Anthropic's2 file is the cleanest example — it begins # Anthropic Developer Documentation and then ships the markdown body of every API reference page, every guide, every Messages API doc, inline in one response.

A service-business Squarespace site does not have that consumer. Cursor and Claude Code do not need to load every /services, /pricing, and /contact page in one fetch. The standard llms.txt is enough.

The variant, at a glance

0

mentions of llms-full.txt in the official llms.txt specification on llmstxt.org.

llmstxt.org · 2024-09-03
2

AI-platform docs publish a public llms-full.txt today — Anthropic and Perplexity.

Perplexity docs · 2026-Q2
1 file

the variant's defining property — the entire content corpus in one markdown response.

Anthropic docs · 2026-Q2

When llms-full.txt is worth the work

Ship llms-full.txt in three cases: your site has a developer-documentation section that someone might want to load into an IDE assistant, your site has a reference body — a guide, a wiki, a knowledge base — where the full content is the value, or you are running a documentation product where API consumers are part of the audience. Skip it everywhere else. For a wedding photographer, a coffee roaster, a therapist, the base llms.txt covers the case and the maintenance cost of the expanded variant outweighs the marginal signal.

The signal-to-noise heuristic: if a developer would plausibly say "load this site's docs into my assistant", ship llms-full.txt. If the answer is no, the base llms.txt is the right artifact.

Installing llms-full.txt on Squarespace

If you decided to ship the variant, the install is identical to the base install on the hub. Create a page at the slug /llms-full, paste the expanded markdown body into a Markdown block, then add the URL Mapping that bridges /llms-full.txt to it. Verify with curl. The expanded body is what differs — it can run thousands of lines, so author it in a real editor locally and paste in one pass rather than typing into the Squarespace editor.

URL Mappings The URL Mapping line — paste into Settings > Advanced > URL Mappings 
 /llms-full.txt -> /llms-full 301

Squarespace's URL Mappings4 enforce the same arrow syntax and same 301/302-only constraint as the base install. The body of the destination page is the only thing that scales: where the base /llms page is a 20-line index, the /llms-full page can be tens of thousands of words.

Cross-reference the two files. The standard llms.txt should include a final link to llms-full.txt under an optional H2 section — both Anthropic and Perplexity do this. The line: - [Full markdown content](https://example.com/llms-full.txt): Full content of every documentation page in one file. That single link tells consumers the expanded variant exists if they want it.

The maintenance burden, called out plainly

A standard llms.txt is a curated index that changes a few times a year — once when you launch a new service page, once when pricing updates, once when you add a major guide. An llms-full.txt is a markdown copy of every page on the site. Every edit, every new blog post, every pricing change has to be reflected in the file or it drifts out of date. The drift is the real cost: an outdated full-body manifest is worse than no manifest at all because consumers may quote the stale version.

The pragmatic mitigation: if you ship llms-full.txt, automate the build step. Most Squarespace owners do not have a build pipeline, which is why the recommendation defaults to no for almost everyone. If you do have one — a static-site mirror, a docs build, a knowledge-base export — the variant becomes cheap and the recommendation flips.

Validate both files together. The validate leaf covers the same curl chain and validator pass for either file at its canonical URL.

Keep reading · § 1.6