Physician directory

DocFinderPro

Re-platformed from Laravel to Next.js and Sanity, and rebuilt to be found by AI answer engines rather than only by search.

Role: Architect and engineer
Years: Launched August 2026
Status: In production
Stack: Next.js, Sanity, AWS

Fig. 01

The bet

A directory lives or dies on being found. For fifteen years that meant ranking in Google. It increasingly means being the source an answer engine cites — Google AI Overviews, Bing, ChatGPT — which is a related but not identical problem.

Classic SEO optimises a page to win a ranked list. Being cited by a model means the content has to be extractable, unambiguous, and structured enough that a machine reading it can tell what is a fact about which entity. Those goals overlap, but where they diverge the second one now matters more for a directory.

Fig. 02

What that changed

Moving from Laravel templates to Next.js and Sanity was not a rewrite for its own sake. It was about getting content into a structured shape. In a template-rendered system the structure lives in the markup; in a content-modelled system the structure is the source, and the markup, the metadata and the structured data all derive from it. One model, many outputs.

That makes the machine-readable layer a consequence of the content model rather than a thing bolted on per page — which is the only way it stays correct as the directory grows.

Outcome

Indexed pages roughly doubled after launch.

Blue

Turns an inbound referral — often still a fax — into a booked appointment, over text.