No, anonymous users receive session-based recommendations, not just popularity lists. Multi-armed bandit algorithms can personalize within a session using signals a user generates during that visit alone, without any historical profile. The critical infrastructure decision is what happens at login: the system should merge the anonymous session history with the authenticated user's existing profile rather than discarding it. On platforms with high anonymous traffic - up to 70% in ad-supported models - handling this merge correctly has a direct impact on recommendation quality at scale.