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Cookies have long been the default tool brands reach for when personalizing the web. For over 30 years, small text files stored in browsers have given companies a window into how users move across the web—and a way to tailor ads and content accordingly. But privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA, restrictions in browsers like Firefox and Safari, and shifting consumer expectations have gradually eroded their effectiveness, pushing brands to search for alternatives.
What emerged to fill that gap, though, has its own set of tradeoffs. First-party data, contextual targeting, and login-based personalization all attempt to tackle this problem, but they share the same flaw—they personalize for segments, not the individual.
However, a new Sneak from Adobe called Project Page Turner is taking a different approach—and it’s powered by artificial intelligence. Adobe previewed it exclusively with The AI Economy ahead of its public unveiling this week.
Disclosure: I'm attending Adobe's AI Summit as a guest of the company, with my flights and hotel costs covered. Adobe did not review the contents of this article before publishing. These words are my own.Meet Project Page Turner
What if you could use a large language model to transform your website so it feels tailor-made for every visitor? It’s what Adobe is exploring with Project Page Turner, a working idea that helps brands provide a more one-to-one experience.
Paolo Mottadelli, the Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) engineering director and the creator of this project, says the timing is right—inference speeds have improved to the point where personalized pages can be generated in real-time. Models are now fast enough to deliver a first response in under 100 milliseconds, quicker than you can blink, and with the full page loading in under a second—well below the two-second threshold most users expect.
He points out that websites haven’t really changed: “Everybody goes to the same page, and then there is the marketer-driven personalization that requires effort, and it’s limited.” What Project Page Turner does is empower the page to “imagine itself based on what the site knows about the visitor.” In other words, Mottadelli imagines a future in which websites are no longer “static” or even exist anymore.
“They will create themselves under the browsing experience of the user,” he says.
Conceived From Customer Feedback
The idea behind Project Page Turner didn’t appear out of nowhere. Mottadelli reveals it originated from customer feedback—in working with more than 90 AEM customers in the past year, he was repeatedly asked for ways to provide better, more meaningful personalization. He recalls working on this project back “when technology to do it was not around yet.” Now, it is.
As the company behind one of the web’s leading content management platforms, Adobe has a direct stake in how websites evolve. Mottadelli says that after seeing Google provide dynamic visual answers that took three minutes to generate, his team began asking what would happen if that same experience could be delivered “in a page delivery timeframe, which happens to be under two seconds.”
After some successful trialing, Mottadelli believes “this might be one of the directions the world [wide] web is going.”
Unsurprisingly, Project Page Turner sits on top of AEM, utilizing it in two ways: AEM Assets—where brands already store images, video, and content—is the content library this system draws from; and AEM Sites—Adobe’s content management system—provides the layout elements. Project Page Turner applies a new indexing layer that makes both rapidly accessible to a fast LLM, allowing it to assemble a personalized page on the fly.
Mottadelli notes that Project Page Turner’s inference and underlying models are currently provided by Cerebras, primarily using GPT—though any fast model can be swapped in—reflecting Adobe’s broader model-agnostic approach, as evidenced by its Firefly platform.
When implemented, brands need to provide the LLM with brand guidelines, product knowledge, and content rules. All of this goes into instructing it on what to recommend and when, similar to how you’d brief a new employee on company policy. Mottadelli predicts that, eventually, “training the website is like training a human.”
How Project Page Turner May Work
One possible way to implement Project Page Turner could be through a website’s search feature. Say you’re a personal trainer looking for a new blender that can make multiple protein shakes for your clients. Instead of visiting Amazon or Google, you go directly to a website like Vitamix to do your research. There, you start by entering your query in the search feature.
Traditionally, information is surfaced by keyword or by a referenced product name. However, Project Page Turner analyzes the natural language query and returns a fully customized results page just for you. So, you can specify that you’re curious about how different models compare in terms of heavy daily use and cleanup, and that speed matters a lot.
What gets generated isn’t a generic results page where you have to click through to find piecemeal information. Rather, you’re provided a fully assembled experience built around your specific request. Information about high-volume blenders, self-cleaning instructions, thick protein shake recipes, model comparisons, and purchase options all surface together, organized around what you actually asked for.
“The prompt is basically zero-party data…it doesn’t require cookies,” Eric Matisoff, Adobe’s principal evangelist, tells The AI Economy. “It wouldn’t require… second-party or third-party data to that user in order to personalize [the search results].”
He adds, “The most interesting thing to analyze across an entire website is internal search data, because there’s no other time that someone is telling you exactly what they’re looking for than when they’re doing an internal search on your website. This takes that to the next step, while also building the personalized experience on the fly.”
Beyond the explicit intent of the search prompt, Project Page Turner can also learn from how you browse—observing which products you view, which categories you explore, and what content you engage with. Mottadelli adds that if you arrive at a supported site from ChatGPT, Google, or another platform, the system could carry that intent over as well. But regardless of the signals available, he emphasizes that consent is central to the vision.
Mottadelli says that his ambitions for Project Page Turner extend far beyond the search bar. “What we’re really envisioning is the seamless browsing experience that the website is…becoming your second skin without you even noticing.” He imagines sites adapting so closely to us that it feels natural and invisible, easily picking up intent and signals and quietly reshaping content and layout around us in real time. How this idea is realized isn’t a technology question but rather a question of how companies want users to experience their websites.
ChatGPT, But With the Brand Experience
People approach traditional search engines and AI chatbots like Perplexity, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, or Anthropic’s Claude very differently. The former is about discovery—you’re browsing and exploring without a clear destination—while the latter is about intent; you have a specific goal in mind and expect a tailored answer.
Brands want to capitalize on intent signals without sending visitors to a third-party platform. Yes, ChatGPT answers your question, but it strips away the brand experience—the visuals, the product narrative, the path to purchase. A brand website has all of that, but can’t respond to your specific intent in real time. Project Page Turner is Adobe’s attempt to sit in between: a brand website that behaves like a chatbot.
Companies can already extend their brands to platforms like ChatGPT. Booking.com, Canva, Coursera, Expedia, Figma, Spotify, Zillow, Upwork, and even Adobe have integrated their services with the popular chatbot. But that means operating on someone else’s turf and surrendering control of the brand experience. Project Page Turner flips that dynamic, keeping AI’s intent-driven responsiveness on the brand’s own website.
“This is putting two things together: immediate reaction to the intent with breadthful brand experience,” Mottadelli says.
Whether Adobe can defend Project Page Turner against the likes of OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Salesforce, and others—some of which are moving aggressively to disrupt established players—remains to be seen. But Mottadelli argues that Adobe has something they mostly do not: 4,000 enterprise customers, decades of content management infrastructure, and direct relationships with the marketing teams responsible for brand experiences. “AEM has the right technology to implement [this solution],” he says. The advantage isn’t the technology, Mottadelli points out—it’s the trust.
What Are Adobe Sneaks?
Project Page Turner is one of seven so-called Sneaks being unveiled this week at Adobe’s AI Summit. None are committed to the product roadmap, though Matisoff notes that historically, 30 to 40 percent have made it into production in some form. That said, the goal of Adobe Sneaks is to highlight innovation.
Matisoff says that AI has contributed to an increase in ideas, all jockeying to be featured on stage: “Last year, we had a little over 150 [submissions]. This year, we had well over 500.” He adds that even after identifying the projects that will be featured at the event, “we’ve seen the ideas continue to advance at a more rapid pace…because of how easy it is for our teams to ideate and expand and improve what they’re delivering.”
Adobe Sneaks isn’t unique to Summit—the showcase also happens at Adobe Max. Think of it as Silicon Valley demo day with a comedic twist: engineers present their ideas on stage before a live audience of thousands, Matisoff, and a celebrity co-host. This year, that’s comedian, actress, and producer Iliza Shlesinger.
And for those who want a say in what gets built, new this year is a concept that lets audience members vote for their favorite Sneak. The results will help influence the product roadmap. Now, everyone can voice their support in hopes that their favorite idea becomes reality.
For Adobe, the stakes around Sneaks extend beyond any single idea. The company faces mounting pressure—not just from longtime rivals like Figma and Canva, but also from AI-native challengers like Anthropic rewriting the rules of the software industry. Matisoff sees this showcase as proof that Adobe hasn’t lost its founder mentality—that innovation still bubbles up from anywhere in the organization. He points to a line from one of Adobe’s founders that still guides the program: “Great ideas can come from anywhere in the company.” In 2026, Adobe needs that to be true more than ever.
Featured Image: Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen addresses attendees during the Day 1 keynote at Adobe Summit 2026 in Las Vegas on April 20. Credit: Ken Yeung
