Methods, devices, and computer-readable storage media that make an asynchronous JavaScript and extensible mark-up language (AJAX) application content state bookmarkable and crawlable include receiving a HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) request is received. The HTTP request includes an HTTP request uniform resource locator (URL) representing a current application state. When the HTTP request URL contains a first reference substring, a second substring is extracted from the HTTP request URL based upon the first reference substring. A modified URL is generated based at least in part on the extracted second substring. The modified URL represents the current application content state.