Research
Open-access AEO methodology.
ThatDevPro publishes peer-reviewable engine optimization research with citable DOIs. All papers CC BY 4.0. All software MIT licensed. All datasets CC BY 4.0. Free reuse with attribution.
Methodology papers
AEO Methodology: A Reference Implementation for Engine Optimization Across AI-Mediated Retrieval Systems
A unified methodology for engine optimization across classical search (SEO), answer-engine optimization (AEO), Google AI Overviews (AIO), generative engine optimization (GEO), and large language model optimization (LLMO). Defines the four canonical AI-citation surfaces and the live Schema.org injection pattern.
Crawler Signal Reference Library: 30 Documents on HTML and HTTP Signals
30-document reference covering every HTML and HTTP signal a web crawler reads. 18 HTML signals (meta tags, Open Graph, Twitter Cards) plus 12 HTTP signals (status codes 2xx-5xx, header categories). Pairs with the live web reference at thatdevpro.com/reference/.
Open-source software
aio-surfaces — AI-citation surface generator
Python and JavaScript toolkit generating llms.txt, aeo.json, entity.json, brand.json, and ai.txt from a single typed site config. Same code powers thatdevpro.com.
seo-sidecar — Live Schema.org JSON-LD injection for nginx
FastAPI + nginx Server Side Include sidecar. Push structured data to your hosting machine. nginx pulls it on each request. No redeploys, no cron jobs. Production-tested across 130+ live sites.
Datasets
Engine Optimization Reference Corpus
26 canonical reference pages from ThatDevPro Reference Library indexed for training and evaluating AEO/GEO scoring systems.
llms.txt Directory Snapshot — May 2026
Snapshot of 735+ websites implementing the llmstxt.org specification.
AEO Citation Tracking Schema
Reference schema for tracking when and how AI search engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot) cite a website.
Crawler Signal Reference Library (HF mirror)
30 documents on HTML and HTTP crawler signals — same content as the Zenodo deposit, structured for ML training pipelines.
How to cite
All research outputs use DOIs where possible. For software, cite the Zenodo archive (each version gets its own DOI). For methodology, cite the published paper. For datasets, cite the Hugging Face URL.
About the author
Joseph W. Anady. ORCID 0009-0008-8625-949X. Wikidata Q139901957. Google Knowledge Graph MID /g/11n57xh708. Founder of ThatDevPro and ThatDeveloperGuy.