AI chatbot plugins for WordPress all look the same on their home page: “answer your visitors 24/7”. The differences show up after installation, when the chat gets things wrong, costs more than expected, or teaches you nothing about your visitors.
Here are seven questions to ask before choosing.
1. Does it answer only from your pages?
A general AI model knows a lot, but not your prices, your opening hours or your terms. If it fills the gaps with general knowledge, it makes things up. The right behaviour: answer only from your site’s content, and say “I don’t know” when the information is not there.
Try it: ask a question whose answer is not on your site, and see what it says.
2. Does it show its sources?
An answer without sources asks visitors to take it on trust. An answer with links to the pages used lets them check, and brings them back to your content.
3. Does it update itself?
You publish a post, change a price, delete a page: the chat needs to know. Be wary of tools where you have to run a sync by hand, or that only re-read your site once a week. Check what it reads, too: pages, posts, categories, ACF fields.
4. Does it really understand your visitors?
Your visitors make typos, ask follow-up questions (“and for children?”) and don’t all speak your language. A good assistant understands all of that, and answers in the visitor’s language, even if your site only exists in English.
5. What does it teach you about your visitors?
A chat is also a valuable source of information: what your visitors are looking for, in their own words. Check whether the tool shows you the most frequent questions, and above all the unanswered ones: those are the next pages to write.
6. What does it really cost?
The advertised price is not always the price you pay. Questions to ask:
- do you need an OpenAI key or an account with an AI provider, paid separately?
- what happens when the included volume is exceeded: does the chat stop, or is the overage billed, and at what price?
- are you warned before reaching the limit?
- is the price per site, and what do several sites cost?
7. Where does the data go?
The chat receives your visitors’ questions, sometimes with personal data. Hosting, AI model, cookies, retention periods: we listed the points to check in AI chatbots and the GDPR: 8 things to check.
Last step: try it with your own content
No demo beats a trial on your own site. Install the tool, let it read your pages, then ask it the ten questions your visitors ask most often, and two trick questions whose answer is not on your site.
DigiSeer was designed to say yes to these seven questions: answers from your pages only, with their sources, automatic updates, unanswered questions in the dashboard, AI included with no key to provide, data hosted in France. Compare for yourself: DigiSeer vs alternatives, or install the free plan.