An AI chatbot for small business websites, trained on what you know

Your website probably already answers most of the questions people ask. The prices are on one page, the opening hours are in the footer, the parking note is somewhere under "Visit us". And still the emails arrive: "Are you open on bank holidays?", "Do you do gluten-free?", "How much for a boiler service?". People don't read websites. They skim, then they ask.

An AI chatbot for small business websites gives those people somewhere to ask, at the moment they're looking, and answers from your own information rather than from the internet at large. Done properly, it also does the thing a contact form can't: it books the appointment, or takes the name and number of someone who is ready to buy.

This page explains how Klugon's website chatbot works, how to put it on your site, how to teach it, what it does with the conversations, what it costs, and where it stops. That last part gets its own section. Some chat tools promise a lot; we would rather you knew the edges before you start.

What the website chatbot does

Klugon's chatbot is a chat window that sits in the corner of your website. A visitor opens it, types a question, and an AI assistant replies. Behind it sits the same assistant that can also answer your phone or your WhatsApp, if you use those products, so everything you teach it is used on every channel.

On your website it can:

• Answer questions about your services, prices, hours, location and policies, from the knowledge you have added.
• Book appointments into Klugon's built-in calendar, using your opening hours, service lengths and staff, and reschedule or cancel them when a customer asks.
• Capture leads: name, contact details and what the person needs, saved to your leads list.
• Suggest products from the catalogue you have entered, and related items where that makes sense.
• Share useful links you have saved, such as your map, a booking page or a returns policy.
• Hand the conversation to your team when it can't help, or when the visitor asks for a person.

Every conversation appears in your Klugon inbox, alongside phone calls and messages from other channels.

Who it suits

Website chat earns its keep where visitors arrive with questions they want answered before they act. Typical examples:

• a physio or beauty clinic, where people want to know which treatment to book;
• a trades business, where the question is "do you cover my area and roughly what does it cost?";
• a restaurant or café fielding allergen, booking and opening-hours questions (see our restaurants page);
• a small shop answering stock, delivery and returns questions;
• a tutor, driving instructor or language school with a page of prices nobody reads.

It suits less well where every enquiry is unique and needs a quote from a person. You can still use it there, but its main job becomes taking details rather than answering.

How an AI chatbot for small business works behind the scenes

When a visitor sends a message, three things happen.

First, it looks up your knowledge. Everything you have added (documents, pasted text, imported web pages) is split into passages and stored in a search index. The assistant searches that index for passages that match the question. Each business's knowledge is kept separate, so your chatbot only ever searches your own material.

Second, it decides whether it needs a tool. If the visitor wants to book, the assistant uses Klugon's booking tools to fetch free slots and create the booking. If they want something from your catalogue, it searches your products. If they are ready to be contacted, it saves a lead. If they need a person, it hands the conversation over.

Third, it writes a reply using what it found, in the tone and with the rules you have given it in its instructions.

That is why the most important setup work is writing things down. A chatbot trained on your own data is only as good as that data. If your knowledge base says nothing about weekend opening, the assistant has nothing to go on, and you want it to say so and take details rather than guess. Our article on what to teach your AI receptionist has a starter list.

The custom knowledge base

You can teach the chatbot in five ways:

A few limits worth knowing:

• Scanned PDFs aren't read. If your price list is a photo of a printed sheet saved as PDF, the text inside it can't be extracted. Retype it, or paste it in.
• Web pages aren't refreshed automatically. An imported page is read once. When you change your prices, add the page again or update the pasted text.
• The site scan is not a full crawl. It picks up to eight pages. If your important information lives deeper in the site, import those pages one by one.
• File uploads need the chatbot's Business tier or above. On the Starter chatbot plan you can still paste text, import pages and scan the site. (Voice and social plans include uploads on every tier.)
• Knowledge is shared across your assistants. If you run more than one assistant, they all search the same knowledge.

Teaching it well

Good knowledge bases share a few habits:

• Write it as answers, not marketing. "Yes, we have step-free access from the car park on Mill Lane" beats "We welcome everyone".
• Include the awkward rules. Minimum order, call-out charge, cancellation terms, the postcode areas you cover, the services you don't offer.
• Say what it shouldn't do. "Don't give quotes for roof work; take details and hand to the team." "Don't comment on whether a symptom is serious."
• Keep prices in one place. If prices appear in three documents and one is out of date, the assistant may quote the old one.
• Add the answer when you see a gap. The insights page lists "questions without a good answer" and the most asked questions of the last 30 days. Each gap is a line to add.

Writing the assistant's instructions

Knowledge tells the assistant what is true about your business. Instructions tell it how to behave. They are a short block of plain text on the assistant's settings page, and they shape every reply.

What to put in them

A useful set of instructions covers five things:

• Tone. "Friendly and brief. British spelling. No exclamation marks." Or "Formal; we are a law firm." Two lines are enough.
• The job. "Your main aim is to book a free consultation, or take a name and phone number if the visitor isn't ready."
• Hard limits. The topics it must never give an opinion on: medical symptoms, legal outcomes, investment advice, whether a gas smell is safe.
• Handover rules. When to hand the conversation to a person, and the rule that it takes a phone number or email first.
• Honest gaps. What you don't offer, so it doesn't offer it. "We don't send reminders or confirmation emails." "We don't deliver outside the OX postcodes." "We don't take card payments in chat."

An example for a made-up dental practice

• You are the website assistant for Brookside Dental. Be warm, clear and brief, in British English.
• Help visitors understand our treatments and prices, and book check-ups and hygiene appointments.
• Never comment on whether pain, swelling or bleeding is serious. For anything that sounds urgent, give the practice phone number and our out-of-hours advice from the knowledge base, then hand the conversation to the team.
• Don't book new patients for implants or orthodontics. Take their name and phone number and hand over for a consultation call.
• Before handing over, always ask for a name and a phone number or email.
• We don't send appointment reminders or confirmation emails. Tell people to note the booking reference.

That is the whole thing. Short instructions are easier for the assistant to follow and easier for you to keep up to date.

Questions it should hand over, not answer

Every business has a few questions where a wrong answer costs more than a slow one. Write them into the instructions as handover rules. Common examples across small businesses:

• anything about symptoms, injuries or whether to seek urgent help;
• complaints, refunds outside your written policy, or a dispute about a bill;
• quotes for custom work, bulk orders or events;
• anything involving a child's safety or a safeguarding concern;
• legal, tax or financial questions, if you work in those fields;
• press, job applications and supplier sales pitches, which are better taken as a lead with a note.

The assistant still collects contact details first, so nobody leaves without a route back to you.

Adding the AI chatbot to your website

The chatbot is added with a single script tag, the same way you add analytics or a cookie banner. It works on any website where you can add HTML to the page: hand-built sites, website builders and content management systems alike. There is no plugin or app to install, and none is needed.

The script tag

In the Widget page of your dashboard, you choose how the chat button looks and copy a short snippet. It goes just before the closing body tag of your pages. The snippet carries a few settings:

If you can't add a script to your site, there is also an iframe option, which embeds the chat in a fixed area of a page instead of as a floating button.

For background on how script tags load in the browser, MDN's reference on the HTML script element is the standard source.

Where to paste it on common platforms

Each website platform has its own place for custom code. These are the vendors' own instructions:

• WordPress: use a Custom HTML block for a single page, or your theme's footer or a header-and-footer code setting for every page. Note that WordPress strips script tags for users without the right permissions, so do this as an administrator. Our page on adding an AI chatbot to WordPress goes into detail.
• Shopify: add it to your theme's layout file through the code editor; Shopify's guide to editing theme code explains where. See also adding an AI chatbot to Shopify.
• Wix: use the custom code setting and choose "All pages" and "Body - end", as Wix explains in embedding custom code on your site.
• Squarespace: use code injection in the footer field. Squarespace's code injection guide lists which plans include it.
• Webflow and others: look for a "custom code" or "footer code" setting in the site settings.

To be clear about what this is: pasting the script adds the chat window to your pages. It does not connect Klugon to your shop's products, orders or customer accounts on any of these platforms. Products the assistant talks about come from the catalogue you enter in Klugon.

The public business page and QR code

Every Klugon business also gets a public page at its own address on klugon.ai, showing your services, products and reviews, with the chat (and browser voice, on a voice plan) built in. It is handy if you don't have a website yet, or want a link for your social profiles. The Widget page also makes a QR code that points to it, with a printable version for your counter or window.

Branding

On the Starter tier, the chat window shows a small "Powered by Klugon" footer. Business and Scale tiers remove it.

Choosing a welcome message

The welcome message is the first line a visitor sees, and it decides whether they type anything. A vague "Hello, how can I help?" gets fewer replies than one that tells people what the assistant is for. Some made-up examples:

• A salon: "Hi, I'm the salon's AI assistant. Ask me about prices, or book an appointment."
• A plumber: "Need a plumber? Tell me your postcode and the problem, and I'll take your details or book a visit."
• A café: "Ask about today's opening hours, allergens or table bookings."

Saying it is an AI assistant up front is honest, and it tends to make people ask direct questions rather than make small talk.

What happens to each conversation

A chat that ends when the visitor closes the window is only half useful. Here is where the information goes.

The inbox

Every website chat appears in your Klugon inbox, with the other channels you use. You can search, filter by channel and by status (active, escalated, closed), add internal notes, download a transcript or export to CSV.

Leads

When the assistant takes someone's details, it saves a lead. The leads page tracks each one as new, contacted, converted or lost, and you can convert a lead into a customer or export the list. New leads can also be posted to Slack, sent to Zapier, added to a Notion database or added to a Mailchimp audience (respecting the consent the person gave). Those four connections need a voice or social plan on the Business tier or above; on a chatbot-only plan, new leads show up in the dashboard and on the insights page.

If you use a CRM, the assistant can also send leads to HubSpot, Zoho, Salesforce or Pipedrive. That is done by the assistant as an action, rather than happening automatically for every lead, and it needs a voice or social plan on the right tier. Check the pricing page for which tier includes which connection.

Bookings

Appointments made in chat go into Klugon's booking list, using the same rules as on the phone. Our AI appointment booking page explains slot intervals, buffers, minimum notice and staff assignment in full. In chat, unlike on a phone call, the assistant can also move a booking to a new time.

On the website chatbot, booking is listed from the Business tier. External calendar connections (Google, Outlook, Apple, Calendly) are part of the voice and social plans, not the chatbot plans.

Handing over to your team

When the assistant can't help, or the visitor asks for a person, it hands the conversation to your team. In practice that means:

• the conversation is marked "Needs a person" in your inbox;
• a notification goes to Slack or Zapier, if you've connected one (this needs a voice or social plan on Business or above);
• the handover appears on the insights to-do list.

Two important details. First, the assistant isn't paused by a handover, so it keeps replying if the visitor keeps typing. Second, you can't reply to a website chat from the Klugon inbox. Owner replies work on WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and Telegram, but not on the website widget. So for website chats, the handover only works if the assistant has taken the visitor's phone number or email first. Put that in its instructions: "Before handing over, ask for a name and a phone number or email."

That makes this an AI live chat for your website, not a live chat tool for your staff. If your team wants to type replies to website visitors in real time, you need a human live-chat product, possibly alongside this one.

A sample website chat

Copperbeech designs and builds garden offices. Its knowledge base has a price guide, the counties it covers, its planning-permission FAQ and a rule: "Don't give fixed quotes. Offer a free site survey and take details." Site surveys are listed as a 60-minute service, Monday to Friday.

Visitor: hi how much is a garden office roughly

Assistant: Hello. Copperbeech's garden offices start from around £14,000 for a 3 × 2.5 metre insulated room, including foundations and installation. The final price depends on size, glazing and where it goes in the garden, so the team gives exact prices after a free site survey. Would a survey be useful?

Visitor: maybe. do I need planning permission

Assistant: Often not, but it depends on the size, height and position. Copperbeech's guide says many garden rooms fall under permitted development if they are single-storey and kept within the height limits near a boundary. Your local council has the final say, and the surveyor will check it for your garden. Would you like me to book the survey?

Visitor: ok. we're in Didcot

Assistant: Didcot is within the area Copperbeech covers. The next survey slots are Wednesday at 10:00 or Thursday at 14:00. Which works better?

Visitor: thursday

Assistant: Lovely. Could I take your name, address and a phone number for the surveyor?

Visitor: Sam Patel, 12 Orchard Way, OX11 7AB, 07700 900789

Assistant: Thanks, Sam. Your free site survey is booked for Thursday at 14:00 at 12 Orchard Way, with reference CGR-2214. The surveyor will look at access, ground levels and the spot you have in mind. If you'd like to change the time, just message here with the reference.

What made that work: the price guide and the planning FAQ were in the knowledge base, the "don't give fixed quotes" rule was in the instructions, and survey availability came from the booking settings. Without those, the assistant would have had to hand over at the first question.

Note too what the assistant didn't promise. No confirmation email, no reminder text. Klugon doesn't send those, so the owner hasn't told the assistant to offer them.

A sample handover

Brookside Dental, from the instructions example above, gets this on a Saturday afternoon.

Visitor: my wisdom tooth is really swollen and my jaw hurts, is that an emergency

Assistant: I'm sorry you're in pain. I can't advise on whether it's urgent, but the practice can. Brookside's out-of-hours advice is to call the practice number and follow the recorded message, which gives the emergency dental line for weekends. If you have difficulty breathing or swallowing, or the swelling is spreading, call 999 or go to A&E.

Visitor: ok. can someone call me monday

Assistant: Yes. Could I take your name and the best number to reach you on? I'll pass it to the team so they can call you when the practice reopens.

Visitor: Leah Morgan 07700 900321

Assistant: Thank you, Leah. I've passed your details and a note about the swollen wisdom tooth to the team.

Behind the scenes, the conversation is flagged "Needs a person", Leah is saved as a lead, and the team sees both on Monday morning. The assistant didn't diagnose, didn't book a routine slot for an urgent problem and didn't promise a callback time the practice hadn't agreed to. All three came from the instructions.

What it can't do

These are the limits as of October 2026. If something here is a deal-breaker, better to know now.

• No human replies from the inbox on website chat. Covered above. Your team follows up by phone or email using the details the assistant took.
• No automatic messages after the chat. No confirmation emails, reminders, follow-up sequences or abandoned-cart messages.
• No SMS. It doesn't send texts of any kind.
• No shop platform integration. It doesn't read your Shopify, WooCommerce or other store's products or orders. Your Klugon catalogue is entered by hand.
• No full website crawl. The scan reads up to eight pages; import others individually.
• No automatic knowledge refresh. Imported pages don't update themselves.
• No guarantee it never gets something wrong. It answers from your knowledge and should hand over when it doesn't know, but an AI can misread a question or a badly worded document. Read the inbox regularly, especially in the first weeks.
• No email alerts to you. You see leads, bookings and handovers in the dashboard, or via Slack and Zapier where your plan includes them.
• No per-assistant knowledge. All your assistants share one knowledge base.

There is one more thing to be careful with: payments in chat. Don't plan your website chat around taking payments in the conversation. Sell through your existing checkout, and use the assistant to answer questions and point people to the right product.

Pricing for the AI chatbot for small business

The website chatbot has its own plans, priced in US dollars:

How it is counted and billed:

• One conversation is one customer thread, not one message. A visitor who asks five questions in one chat is one conversation.
• When you go over, new conversations stop at 110% of your allowance for the month. Chats already in progress are not cut off.
• Unlimited assistants on every tier.
• File uploads to the knowledge base are on Business and Scale.
• Branding removal ("Powered by Klugon") is on Business and Scale.
• Free trial: 7 days. A card is required, and it is charged when the trial ends unless you cancel before.

If you also want the assistant on the phone or on WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, those are separate products with their own plans. The chat you embed with the script tag is text. Visitors can talk to the assistant by voice on your Klugon public page (or the iframe version, which shows that page); that is part of the AI voice agent product and uses voice minutes. Everything is laid out on the pricing page.

Worked example: is it worth it for a small business?

This is an illustration with made-up numbers. Use your own.

Assumptions, for a made-up dog grooming salon with a busy website:

• The salon gets about 90 enquiries a month by website contact form and email.
• Each one takes the owner about 6 minutes to read, check the diary and reply, often in the evening.
• About a third of enquiries are simple questions the website already answers (prices, opening times, "do you do cats?").
• About half end in a booking, after an average of two emails back and forth.
• With a chat window on the site, the salon expects 150 conversations a month, because people who wouldn't fill in a form will type a quick question.

Which plan:

• 150 conversations a month is more than Starter's 100, so the Business tier at $149 a month (400 conversations) fits, with room to grow. Paying yearly, it would be $119 a month.
• Business also includes booking, file uploads (the salon's price list is a PDF) and removes the Klugon branding.

What the owner gets back:

• 90 enquiries × 6 minutes = 9 hours a month spent on email replies today.
• If the chatbot fully handles two thirds of them (questions and straightforward bookings), that is about 6 hours a month back.
• Valuing the owner's time at $25 an hour, that is $150 a month, roughly the plan's cost before counting any extra bookings.

Where the real value is: the extra bookings. If the chat window turns just three or four evening browsers a month into booked appointments at $50 each, that alone covers most of the plan. Whether it does is something you can measure in the first month (see below).

When the numbers don't work: a website with very little traffic, or a business where nearly every enquiry needs a custom quote, may get little from the assistant beyond taking details. In that case, the Starter tier, or simply a better FAQ page, may be enough. Our post on AI chatbots versus FAQ pages weighs that up.

Setup checklist

A practical order of work, from sign-up to a live chat window:

1. Start the trial for the AI chatbot product and create an assistant.
2. Fill in your business details: name, address, opening hours, time zone, contact details.
3. Add your services with durations and staff, if you take bookings.
4. Build the knowledge base. Run the site scan first, then add your price list and policies, then paste in the questions you get asked most.
5. Write the instructions. Tone of voice, what it must never do, when to hand over, and "always take a phone number or email before handing over".
6. Add links to the links library: map, booking page, menu, returns policy.
7. Customise the widget: colour, position, welcome message.
8. Test in the dashboard. Ask twenty real questions from your inbox history. Ask a few it shouldn't answer.
9. Paste the script into your site and check it on a phone as well as a laptop.
10. Connect Slack or Zapier, if you also have a voice or social plan on Business or above, so you hear about leads and handovers without logging in. On a chatbot-only plan, make checking the dashboard part of your day instead.
11. Check the inbox every day for the first fortnight, and fill the gaps the insights page shows.

The dashboard has its own setup checklist for the chatbot (assign an assistant, customise the widget, add it to the website, get the first chat), which tracks the core steps for you.

Common setup mistakes

Chatbots that disappoint usually fail for one of a handful of reasons. None of them is technical.

Launching on the site scan alone. The scan reads your homepage and a few key pages. That is a starting point. Your price list, policies and the questions you answer every week usually live elsewhere, or only in your head. Add them before you go live.

Contradictory documents. Last year's price list uploaded next to this year's, or a pasted FAQ that disagrees with the website. The assistant finds both and may quote either. Delete the old version when you add the new one.

No handover rule for website chats. Because you can't reply to a website chat from the inbox, a handover without a phone number or email is a dead end. Make "take contact details first" the first line of the handover instructions.

Promises the business doesn't keep. If your website says "we'll confirm by email", the assistant may repeat it. Check your own pages for promises like that and either keep them by hand or change the wording.

A widget nobody notices. A grey button in the corner of a grey site gets ignored. Use your brand colour, and a welcome message that says what the assistant can do.

Never reading the conversations. The first fortnight is when you learn what people actually ask. Reading every chat in that period, and fixing each gap as you find it, is the quickest way to cut how often the assistant has to hand over.

Measuring results

After a month, look at:

• Conversations on the analytics page, compared with the previous period, and the busiest hours. Note how many chats arrive outside your opening hours: those are questions nobody would have answered until the next day.
• Handled by the assistant: how many conversations it handled without a handover. A falling handover rate over the first weeks shows the knowledge base is filling in.
• Leads and bookings from the widget channel, and how many leads you converted.
• Questions without a good answer on the insights page. Treat this as your weekly to-do list.
• Your own inbox: are you writing fewer "yes, we're open Saturdays" emails?

If conversations are low, check that the widget appears on every page and that the welcome message invites a question ("Ask about prices, availability or booking") rather than a generic hello.

Privacy and what to tell visitors

A website chat collects personal data as soon as someone types their name or phone number. In the UK, the ICO's guidance on the right to be informed sets out what your privacy notice has to cover: what you collect, why, who it is shared with and how long you keep it. Add a short section on the chat assistant to your privacy notice. A welcome message that mentions the visitor is chatting with an AI assistant is a sensible courtesy too.

Klugon is operated by a German company under the GDPR. Transfers to service providers outside the EU are covered by Standard Contractual Clauses, as listed in our privacy policy. Each business's data, including its knowledge base, is kept separate from every other business's. You can export conversations, leads and customers as CSV and delete individual records; full erasure is by email request.

Leads record marketing consent only when the visitor gives it explicitly, so don't treat a chat as permission to add someone to a newsletter.

How it fits with the rest of Klugon

The website chatbot is one of three products. It is the quickest of the three to set up: paste a script and you are live. Later, the same assistant and the same knowledge can answer your phone (see the AI phone receptionist) or your messages on WhatsApp (see the WhatsApp AI chatbot). If selling products is your main aim, our AI sales assistant page covers product search and suggestions in more depth.

If you are weighing Klugon against a dedicated website chat tool, our Tidio alternative comparison sets out the differences. And for a broader view of what an AI receptionist for small business does across channels, start at our home page.

Frequently asked questions

Does the chatbot work on my website builder?

If you can add custom HTML or a script to your pages, yes. That covers WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, Webflow and hand-built sites. It is a script tag, not a plugin, so there is nothing to install or update on the platform side.

How do I train the chatbot on my own data?

Upload documents (on Business and Scale), paste text, import individual web pages or scan your site. The assistant searches that knowledge for every question. Imported pages aren't refreshed automatically, so update them when your information changes.

Can my staff jump into a website chat and reply?

Not from Klugon. Your team can reply to WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and Telegram conversations from the inbox, but not to website chats. Handed-over website chats are followed up by phone or email, using the details the assistant collected.

What counts as one conversation?

One customer thread. However many messages a visitor sends in that chat, it counts once against your monthly allowance.

What happens if I run out of conversations?

New conversations stop at 110% of your monthly allowance; ongoing ones carry on. You can move to a higher tier on the pricing page.

Can the chatbot take bookings?

Yes. It books into Klugon's built-in calendar using your hours, service lengths and staff, and can move or cancel bookings in chat. Booking is listed from the chatbot's Business tier.

Will it send customers a confirmation email?

No. The confirmation, with a booking reference, is given in the chat. Klugon doesn't send confirmation emails, reminders or texts.

Can visitors talk to it instead of typing?

The script-tag chat window is text only. Browser voice is on your Klugon public page, which you can link to or embed with the iframe option. That feature belongs to the AI voice agent product and uses its voice minutes.

Does it make up answers?

It answers from your knowledge and is told to hand over when it doesn't know. No AI is perfect, though, so check the inbox and the "questions without a good answer" list, and fill gaps as you find them.