Chatbot: answers from your own pages

#Before you start

• The site must be published. The chatbot reads your pages each time the site is published, so a site that hasn't been published gives it nothing to read.
• Answers don't use your credits. There is a daily cap instead, covered under Limits below.
• Hand-offs go to a verified address only: a workspace member's sign-in address, or an outside address whose owner has confirmed it.
• Every conversation is kept for you for 90 days after its last message, under Settings, Chats.
• Who can do what: Owners, Admins and Editors can switch it on, change it and read the chats. Adding outside addresses is for Owners and Admins.

#Switch it on

#How it opens

The How it opens part of the card sets what visitors see before they type anything. A Preview beside the card shows the chat in your site's own colours, with Light and Dark to see it on either background. Anything you leave empty falls back to a sensible default, shown greyed out in the field.

#Add a shared inbox for hand-offs

If questions should go to an inbox that isn't a workspace member, such as a front desk or bookings address, add it under Other addresses on the same card.

The card shows how many you have added, such as “1 of 3 added”. At the limit, the form gives way to a note: “You have added as many addresses as your plan allows. Remove one, or move to a larger plan.” Remove takes an address off the list.

#What visitors see

A round chat button sits in a bottom corner of every page, the right one unless you chose Left, in your site's own colours and typeface, light or dark as the site is. Opening it shows the title, the opening line and the questions to tap.

• Visitors type a question, or tap one, and see moving dots while the answer is written.
• A Talk to a person link at the top takes them straight to the hand-off form.
• When the chat isn't sure, it says so and shows Send this question to the team.
• The hand-off form asks for Your email and Your question, then says “Sent. The team will reply to” followed by their address.
• On the visitor's side, the conversation lives in that browser tab only and is gone when they close it. Your copy is kept in the studio (see Every chat, below).

#What it will and won't answer

The chatbot has no knowledge of its own and no separate list of answers to fill in. It reads the words on your published pages and keeps to them.

• It will answer from anything your pages say: services, prices, opening hours, areas covered, how to book.
• It will reply in the language the visitor writes in, in one to four short sentences, in the tone you chose.
• It won't invent prices, opening hours, availability, policies, people, addresses or contact details. If no page says it, the chat says it isn't sure and offers a hand-off.
• It won't chat about things unrelated to your business; it declines politely.
• It won't say how the site or the chat was made.
• It only reads words. Text inside pictures isn't read. It reads up to about 60,000 characters across the site, home page first and at most 14,000 from any one page, so on a very large site the last pages may be cut short.

If you use AI agents, the chat can also answer from what they know about the business, once you share those facts with it from the agents' Memory. The Chatbot tab says how many shared facts it has.

#Hand-offs

A hand-off is a question the chat passes to a person. When the chat can't answer, or the visitor asks for a human, it offers to send the question on, and the visitor leaves their email address with it.

You get an email titled “New question from” your site's name, with the question and the conversation before it. Reply to that email and your answer goes straight to the visitor. The bell in the studio tells you too: “A visitor to” your site “asked for a person”. The question also appears under Questions passed to you on the Chatbot tab (the latest 20), marked email not sent if the email failed. The weekly analytics email counts them too.

A hand-off that reads as spam is kept and marked Likely spam, with held, not emailed beside it, and nobody is told. If it is a real question, an Owner, Admin or Editor presses Not spam to take the mark off. Nothing is emailed late, so reply to the visitor yourself from the address shown.

#Every chat

Every chat, at the top of Questions passed to you, opens Chats: every conversation visitors had with your site's chat in the last 90 days, newest first, 50 to a page. Each row shows When, the First question, the number of Messages, the Page it started on and the Country, with a Passed to you tag on those the visitor sent to the team. Click the first question to read the whole conversation as plain text.

• Search. Type in Words in a chat to find conversations that mention a product, a price or a name.
• Export CSV saves the conversations as a spreadsheet file.
• What is kept. The visitor's messages and the replies the chat really gave, up to 200 turns a conversation. A conversation is removed 90 days after its last message.
• Who can read them. Owners, Admins and Editors. Viewers cannot open the Chats section.

#Make its answers better

The chat only knows your pages, so the way to improve it is to improve the pages. Every hand-off is a gap on your site.

#Limits

Every question a visitor sends counts once towards the 400, so a conversation of five questions uses five. A visitor's message is read up to 1,000 characters.

#Turn it off

Turn the switch off on the Chatbot tab and click Save. The button leaves the live site within a minute. Questions already passed to you stay listed, and past conversations stay under Chats until their 90 days are up.