How to Add an AI Chatbot to Your Website

Step 1: decide what the chatbot is for

Give it one job. A chatbot that tries to be a salesperson, a support desk and a booking system answers all three badly. Choose the most common reason people message you: opening hours and location, price guidance, booking, order status or product questions.

Write the job as one sentence, such as: answer questions about our services and prices, take a booking request, and pass anything else to a person. That sentence becomes your test later.

Step 2: write the answers it will use

The quality of a chatbot is the quality of the material you give it. Open your inbox, your WhatsApp and your call notes, and list the 15 to 30 questions people ask most. Write a short, plain answer to each, in your own words.

Include the things you want it to refuse: legal or medical advice, firm prices for complex jobs, anything about a specific order it cannot see. Then tell it to say so when it does not know and offer a person instead. Most chatbot mistakes come from missing material, not from the technology.

Step 3: choose a route and a tool

There are four routes, with very different costs. Prices below are from each vendor's own page, checked in November 2026. We compared published figures and did not try the products.

Cost per conversation varies a lot. Here is illustrative arithmetic for 100 conversations. On Tidio's Lyro add-on at USD 32.50 for 50, a conversation costs USD 0.65, so 100 cost USD 65. On Intercom, if the agent resolves 60 of 100 chats at USD 0.99 each, you pay about USD 59, plus seats. On Chatbase's Basic plan, if one credit is used per AI reply, which depends on the model you pick, and a conversation averages four replies, 4,000 credits cover 1,000 conversations, so 100 cost about USD 12. Check each vendor's definition of a credit or conversation before you trust any of these numbers.

Step 4: install it

Most tools give you a script to paste or a plugin to install. On WordPress that means a plugin. On other sites it means adding the snippet before the closing body tag, usually through your site settings. Do this on a staging copy or a single page first.

Two things to check afterwards. First, the widget loads third-party scripts, so test your page speed before and after. Second, if it sets cookies, your cookie notice needs to cover it, and consent should be obtained before it loads where the law requires. Our GDPR guide for Cyprus business websites covers consent and notices.

Step 5: test it with 30 awkward questions

Test before any customer sees it. Use real questions from your inbox and add ones designed to break it.

Keep a score. If more than two or three of 30 answers are wrong, fix the material and run the test again before launch.

Step 6: add the handover and tell visitors it is an AI

Every chatbot needs a visible way to reach a person and a first message that says what it is. Article 50 of the EU AI Act has applied since 2 August 2026. It requires chatbot providers to design systems so people are informed they are interacting with an AI, unless that is obvious. The 2026 Digital Omnibus on AI, Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, did not move this duty. Say it anyway, in your own words.

For handover, collect a name and a phone number or email, and send the transcript to the right person. Decide what happens out of hours, and tell the visitor when they will hear back. If you use an automation platform, you can push each handover into your CRM and alert a phone. Our guide to AI customer service agents shows how to measure whether the answers are actually right.

Step 7: review every week

Read a sample of conversations every week for the first two months. Update the answers when your prices or hours change. Treat the questions it could not answer as a list of content your website is missing: if visitors keep asking something, put the answer on a page, which also helps search. Our SEO services page explains how we approach that.

Data protection: the short list

Chat transcripts contain names, contact details and whatever people choose to type, so they are personal data. Under GDPR Article 28, a vendor that handles them for you must be under a contract that limits what it can do with the data. Ask for the vendor's data processing agreement, check where data is stored and for how long, and tell visitors in your privacy notice. Do not invite people to type health, legal or payment details into the chat. This is general information, not legal advice.

Where to go next

If you want the widest view of what to choose, read best AI tools for small business. If the chatbot is part of a bigger plan, our AI automation service covers the connections behind it. Two questions that tend to follow are whether AI can rebuild the site itself, covered in can AI redesign your website, and how structured data is added to a page, covered in our schema markup guide.