diff --git a/content/docs/tools/_index.md b/content/docs/tools/_index.md
index 07d655c..d216f7e 100644
--- a/content/docs/tools/_index.md
+++ b/content/docs/tools/_index.md
@@ -10,6 +10,7 @@ Standalone tools built alongside git-pkgs. Each is a single binary (or workflow)
 - **pin** vendors browser assets without npm
 - **outline** reduces a source tree to a structural skeleton for LLMs
 - **capcheck** fails CI when Go code gains new privileged capabilities
+- **licenses** scans repositories for license text against ScanCode's rule corpus
 - **distill** trains an oss-taxonomy classifier from an LLM-labelled corpus
 - **actions** are reusable GitHub Actions wrapping git-pkgs commands
 - **skills** is a Claude Code plugin exposing git-pkgs as agent skills
@@ -20,6 +21,7 @@ Standalone tools built alongside git-pkgs. Each is a single binary (or workflow)
   {{< card link="pin" title="pin" subtitle="Browser asset vendoring" >}}
   {{< card link="outline" title="outline" subtitle="Source tree compression" >}}
   {{< card link="capcheck" title="capcheck" subtitle="Go capability drift" >}}
+  {{< card link="licenses" title="licenses" subtitle="License text scanning" >}}
   {{< card link="distill" title="distill" subtitle="oss-taxonomy classifier training" >}}
   {{< card link="actions" title="actions" subtitle="Reusable GitHub Actions" >}}
   {{< card link="skills" title="skills" subtitle="Claude Code plugin" >}}
diff --git a/content/docs/tools/licenses.md b/content/docs/tools/licenses.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4398f82
--- /dev/null
+++ b/content/docs/tools/licenses.md
@@ -0,0 +1,44 @@
+---
+title: licenses
+---
+
+Scan a repository for license text using ScanCode's rule corpus. Matching runs from an embedded, prebuilt index with no network access, cgo, or Python.
+
+The scanner uses whole-file hashes, exact token sequences, and `SPDX-License-Identifier` tag lines. It does not do fuzzy or sequence matching, so edits inside a license text can prevent a match. On a repository like Forgejo (~7 000 files) a scan finishes in about a second.
+
+```
+licenses .                                     scan the current directory
+licenses -json path/to/repo > licenses.json    write a JSON report
+licenses -scope all -max-files 0 path          include vendored dependencies
+licenses -version                              print binary and corpus versions
+```
+
+JSON output reports each file's detections with rule, expression, kind, method, score, and byte range. Detections carry `identification` set to `identified`, `partial`, or `NOASSERTION` depending on whether the expression names concrete licenses or ScanCode placeholders. Exit status 0 means detections were found, 2 means the scan was incomplete, 3 means no conclusive detections.
+
+## Library
+
+```go
+matcher, err := licenses.New()
+if err != nil {
+    return err
+}
+result, err := matcher.Match(ctx, text)
+```
+
+The corpus is loaded once per process and shared by every `Matcher`.
+
+## Installation
+
+```bash
+brew tap git-pkgs/git-pkgs
+brew trust --tap git-pkgs/git-pkgs
+brew install licenses
+```
+
+or
+
+```bash
+go install github.com/git-pkgs/licenses/cmd/licenses@latest
+```
+
+[View on GitHub](https://github.com/git-pkgs/licenses)