Guides

What an AI assistant on your website actually does

By Ashton Foran, director. Published 30th July 2026. Updated 6th September 2026.

An AI assistant on a website does three jobs: it answers the same twenty questions people ask every week, it takes the details of anyone who wants to be contacted, and it holds the line at what it knows instead of inventing an answer. A real person still follows up on every enquiry.

We run AI assistants on our own site and on client sites, so this is written from watching real ones work, not from a brochure. Strip the hype away and a good one does three jobs.

Job one, it answers the same twenty questions

Every business gets the same questions on repeat. What do you charge, what areas do you cover, how long does it take, do you do X.

The assistant is trained on your real answers and gives them instantly, at any hour. The customer who lands on your site at ten at night gets answered at ten at night, instead of sending the same question to you and two competitors and going with whoever replies first.

Job two, it catches the lead

When a conversation turns serious, the assistant asks for a name and a way to reach them, and that lands with you as an enquiry. On the sites we run, that is the whole point. The chat is a friendlier front door for the same thing your contact form does, and it catches the people who would never fill in a form.

Job three, it holds the line

A good assistant knows what it is allowed to say. Prices come from a fixed list or not at all. It does not negotiate, does not invent discounts, does not guess at things it was never told. When a question is beyond it, the right behaviour is to take the person's details and say a real person will come back to them.

That last part matters more than the clever part. An assistant that makes things up is worse than no assistant, because it makes commitments you never agreed to.

The rule that now applies

Since August 2026, EU rules require a chatbot to make clear that it is AI. If someone asks yours "am I talking to a robot?", it has to answer honestly, and the widget should say what it is up front.

Ours do exactly that, and it costs nothing in results. People do not mind talking to an AI, as long as nobody tricks them into it.

What to check before buying one

Where do its answers come from? They should come from your information, checked by you, not from the model's imagination.

What happens with a question it cannot answer? The right answer involves a human, and the wrong one is whatever it makes up.

Who reads the conversations? Someone should. The chats tell you what customers actually want to know, which is worth as much as the leads.

Does it say it is AI? If not, walk away. That is now a legal problem being sold to you.

Try one right now

There is one in the corner of this page. Ask it something awkward, ask it whether it is a robot, ask it what we charge. What it does is what yours would do.

Or tell us about your business and we will tell you whether an assistant would pay for itself on your site.

Ask us about an assistant