How it works under the hood

Generation is split into six phases. Knowing what's happening helps you spot when something looks off and lets you redirect mid-flight if needed.

The six phases

Branding. Docsio reads your site's CSS variables, downloads your logo and favicon, and identifies your fonts. It picks a primary color and applies them to the docs theme.
Site mapping. It walks every page reachable from your starting URL, up to about a hundred pages, and builds a map of which ones contain product content worth turning into docs.
Content scraping. Each useful page gets read in full — content only, no nav or footer chrome — and stored as cleaned markdown in your project.
Documentation planning. Based on the scraped content, the agent decides the categories and pages your docs site should have. Typical structure: Getting Started, Features, Guides, Integrations, FAQ. Real product info shapes the actual page list.
Page writing. The agent writes every page in your docs site. Not placeholder text — full sentences and code samples derived from your source content, restructured into clear documentation voice.
Polish and audit. Final pass: fix any leftover placeholders, verify the logo, check that internal links resolve, set up the homepage hero and footer with real URLs.

Five minutes is typical. The variables:

Site size. A 5-page landing site finishes in under three minutes. A 100-page marketing site takes closer to seven.
Content density. Sites with a lot of marketing content take longer to scrape and reason about than minimal sites.
Time of day. AI provider load varies. Midday US is the slowest. Off-peak you'll often see under three minutes.

You don't have to sit and watch. Once generation is complete, your account remembers it — Docsio emails you when it's done if you've left.

While it's running:

The status pane shows the current phase and what was just done.
The editor sandbox boots in parallel so it's hot when generation finishes.
You can leave the tab open in the background; it picks up where it left off when you return.

In a small percentage of cases, a phase fails — a slow CDN, an oddly-structured site, a network blip. Two recovery paths:

Retry the phase. A button appears in the status pane. Most failures clear on retry.
Skip and continue. If a particular page won't scrape, Docsio can skip it and continue. You can fill that page in by hand later.

If the whole run won't finish even after retries, contact support — we'll look at the project ID and figure out why.

A few things happen silently in the background:

All of that is automatic. You don't configure any of it.

Most users skip ahead to the editor — Tour the editor →