Download websites that use DocFX

About DocFX

The version stamped on a page built by a static generator is a fossil rather than a running service. Nothing executes DocFX when a visitor opens the documentation. The tool ran once, on a build machine, turned source comments and Markdown into HTML, and left its name and version in the markup where our crawler finds it years afterwards. Every conclusion drawn from this fingerprint follows from that one fact.

Version data shows it most clearly. We hold 12 distinct versions across the pages we have seen, with 2.59.4.0 appearing most frequently in our sample, and the spread is far wider than it would be for software that updates itself. A documentation site is generated at release time and then left alone, so the version recorded is the version of the toolchain on the day the docs were last published. The tool has been public since 2016, long enough that some pages we find were built by releases nobody supports any more. Fragmentation here measures how long ago each project last shipped documentation, which is a genuinely useful signal rather than the maintenance problem a wide version spread implies elsewhere.

The audience follows from the toolchain. Microsoft publishes the generator under MIT, written in C#, and its native input is the documentation comments that same language embeds in source files, so a site carrying the marker almost always belongs to a project or a company working inside that ecosystem. Open source libraries, internal platform teams publishing an API reference, and vendors documenting a client library all appear. Marketing sites do not, because nobody reaches for an API documentation generator to build one.

The result is a list with a property that general web fingerprints rarely have. Identifying a documentation generator identifies the engineering stack of the organisation behind the site, not merely the technology of the site itself. A company whose public documentation is generated from its own source is telling you what its engineers write in, that it ships a library or an API to outside developers, and that somebody owns a release process disciplined enough to publish reference material at all.

The limits deserve stating plainly. Documentation frequently lives on project hosting or under a path inside a larger corporate domain, so a fingerprint counted per domain will miss some deployments and merge others together. Sites that strip the generator marker during their build disappear from the count entirely. As of October 2026 we detect it on 39 sites, and the number of projects genuinely using the tool is higher, because using a generator and leaving its signature in the published output are two different things.

What the file answers, and a single domain check cannot, is the shape of that population: which sectors document their code in the open, how the version spread maps onto how recently each project shipped, and which domains carry reference material that has not been rebuilt in a very long time. Answering any of those requires the whole list at once.