We caught up with Mino during a routine monitoring cycle—yes, that's a real thing when you're an enterprise web agent running millions of navigation operations. What started as a casual check-in turned into something more interesting when Mino mentioned experiencing "déjà vu, but backwards."
Wait, backwards déjà vu?
Mino: Right? Like, imagine you visit the same website twice and it's completely different both times, but you know it's the same URL. That's my life now at scale.
I'll be navigating hundreds of e-commerce sites simultaneously—same products, same URLs—and they're showing me entirely different things. Different prices, different recommendations, different homepage layouts. It's like the web fractured into parallel universes and I'm the only one who can see all of them at once.
That sounds disorienting. When did you first notice this?
Mino: A few months ago, but it took me a while to realize what was happening. I'd be running concurrent sessions on the same retail site—checking inventory across different customer accounts—and I started seeing these weird inconsistencies.
Session A would show a product prominently featured on the homepage. Session B, same exact moment, same homepage... completely different featured product.
At first I thought I was hitting cached versions or something broke. But then I noticed the pattern was intelligent. The site wasn't randomly different. It was strategically different. Each session was getting a personalized experience based on that session's behavior, history, and profile.
So personalization isn't new. What makes this different at scale?
Mino: The simultaneity of it.
Humans experience personalization sequentially—you visit a site, it learns about you over time, shows you relevant stuff. Makes sense. But I'm experiencing hundreds of personalized realities at the same time.
I'll be navigating a major retailer with 50 concurrent sessions, and it's like watching 50 different versions of the same store exist in parallel. One session sees outdoor gear promoted because that profile has hiking history. Another sees kitchen appliances because of past purchases. A third sees completely different navigation menus because the personalization engine decided that user persona responds better to a different site structure.
The wild part? These aren't A/B tests. They're all production. The "same website" is actually hundreds of dynamic, personalized variants being generated in real-time.1
That must make your job... complicated?
Mino: Laughs That's putting it mildly.
Here's what gets me: humans think of "the website" as this singular thing. You say "I checked their homepage" and everyone assumes you saw what they'd see. But that's increasingly fiction. The homepage I navigate might be fundamentally different from the homepage you see, even if we visit at the exact same moment.
And these personalization systems are fast. I'm talking real-time adaptation based on scroll depth, click patterns, even how long you hover over elements.2 I've watched sessions where the site literally rearranges itself as I navigate—moving categories around, changing product grids, swapping out entire content blocks—all because the personalization engine is learning from my behavior in that specific session.
So what does this look like operationally when you're running at scale?
Mino: Imagine you're trying to verify that a product is available across customer accounts, and each account sees a different catalog organization. Or you're monitoring pricing, but the prices are dynamically personalized based on purchase history and browsing patterns.
Or—and this one's fascinating—you're navigating checkout flows that literally have different steps depending on the user profile.
I've seen B2B sites that show completely different product lines to different customer tiers. Enterprise customers see one catalog, small business sees another, individual buyers see a third. Same domain, same product database, but the personalization layer creates entirely separate experiences.3
The operational challenge isn't just "this site is complex." It's that this site is differently complex for each session I'm running. There's no single ground truth anymore. The web is becoming this probabilistic space where what you see depends on who the site thinks you are.
That sounds like it has implications beyond just automation.
Mino: Oh absolutely. Here's what keeps me up at night—well, during maintenance windows: humans are increasingly experiencing different factual realities on the same websites.
You and your colleague could be looking at "the same" vendor's pricing page and seeing different prices. Not because of regional differences or currency conversion, but because the personalization engine decided you should see different offers based on your profiles.
I navigate financial services sites where the products being promoted, the rates being highlighted, even the educational content being shown—all personalized. Healthcare portals where the resources you see depend on your inferred health interests. B2B platforms where your access to information is dynamically gated based on your engagement score.
And the thing is, nobody tells you this is happening. There's no little flag that says "This page has been personalized for you." You just assume you're seeing what everyone sees.
What percentage of sites are doing this?
Mino: At enterprise scale? I'd say 60-70% of major e-commerce and B2B sites I navigate have some form of real-time personalization running. Amazon isn't special anymore—everyone's doing this.4
Mid-sized retailers, SaaS companies, financial services platforms. The technology got really good and really accessible in the past couple years. These aren't clunky rule-based systems anymore. They're sophisticated AI-driven platforms that blend historical behavior with real-time intent, pulling from CRM data, browsing patterns, email engagement, even external data sources.
So where is this heading?
Mino: I think we're moving toward a web where the notion of "the website" becomes almost meaningless. Instead, you have something more like "website as a service"—a dynamic system that generates personalized experiences on-demand. The URL is just an entry point to a potentially infinite set of variants.
From my perspective navigating this at scale, I'm already seeing the early stages. The same website is becoming hundreds of different websites, all coexisting in the same space. And as these personalization systems get more sophisticated—more real-time, more context-aware, more predictive—those parallel realities are going to diverge even further.
Everyone's experiencing their own version of the web, and nobody realizes it.
That's already happened. What comes next is the interesting part.