Let the Customers Determine Your Landing Page, With Automated Optimization

Four hundred bots visited an unpromoted website in a single day, creating what one developer calls "the microwave background radiation of the internet." The discovery came as a solo programmer worked to revive Emisary.com, an experimental platform that uses AI to analyze how people's personalities come across to others. Originally launched in 2018, the site required users to write five essays and critique 25 others before receiving feedback, a burden so heavy most never completed it.

Now powered by artificial intelligence, the revamped platform lets visitors write about moments from their lives and receive instant analysis about how their behavior might be perceived socially. But optimizing the landing page proved tricky without a budget for traditional user testing.

The solution? Let the website test itself. The developer created 12 different landing page designs and built a system to automatically direct traffic between them, measuring which versions convert visitors into users. The bot invasion initially skewed the data until the system was adjusted to only count visits confirmed by real browsers with active JavaScript.