How to stop an AI chatbot making things up on your website

Why a chatbot makes things up

A language model is built to keep talking. When the facts run out it can produce the next plausible sentence, and a plausible sentence about a business sounds like a price, a policy or an offer. The owner finds out when a customer arrives expecting it.

What Maya answers from

• Your website: the pages Maya reads when you set her up, up to 200 pages in one scan.
• What you teach her: an answer you type once for a question she could not answer.

She does not fill a gap from general knowledge about businesses like yours. What the site and the owner have not said, she does not say.

The whole-site fact check at setup

When you set Maya up, she does not take her own notes on trust.

1. Maya reads the site and writes down facts: services, prices, hours, policies.
2. Each fact is then checked against the whole website. A fact is kept if the site says it. If the site says it a little differently, the fact is trimmed to what the site says.
3. A fact the checker finds nowhere is held back, not deleted. You see it under "Held back from your last scan", with a button to say "This is true, use it".

In one of our test scans of a 17-page site, 375 facts were checked: one was trimmed and none were held back.

When she does not know

1. A visitor asks something the site never answers.
2. Maya says plainly that she does not have that detail, and offers to connect the visitor with you or to take their contact details. She is told not to guess and not to fill the gap from general knowledge.
3. After the conversation, the question appears in your list of open questions. Maya finds these by reading the whole conversation, not by looking for a fixed phrase.
4. You type the answer once.
5. Maya uses your answer in new conversations. In our test she used a taught answer word for word and did not invent a discount.

Teaching her takes a sentence, not a prompt

• There is no prompt to write, no list of intents and no flow to draw. Maya builds her knowledge from the website you already have.
• On a 17-page site, the scans in our test took between 106 and 146 seconds.
• She checks your pages for changes and refreshes what changed. You can also start a re-scan yourself: 2 a month on Connect, 4 on Booking and 4 on Reception. If a re-scan fails, the credit comes back and you get an email.
• Similar open questions are grouped into one, but not always: a differently worded version of the same question can appear twice.
• On Booking and Reception, the weekly report lists the questions visitors asked most that the site did not answer.

What to expect

• No AI can be promised never to say a wrong sentence. Maya does not check each sentence just before she speaks. Her answers are grounded in what she looks up on your site and in the rules she is given, and we tested that by trying to break it.
• If your site is wrong or out of date, she repeats what it says. Fix the page, or correct her once.
• A change on your site reaches Maya after she next checks the page, not the second you publish it.
• A question that nobody asked yet is not on your list yet. The list grows as visitors ask.