An AI assistant on your website: what it should do, and what it must never do

An AI assistant on a small-business website should do three things: answer the questions visitors actually ask, using only what you have told it; ask the qualifying questions a good receptionist would ask; and hand the conversation to a person by email with a clean summary. It must never invent a price, promise a result, or pretend to be human. Everything else about whether one is worth having follows from whether those lines are respected — and they are a matter of how it is built, not which AI it uses.

What it is for

The visitor at 11 PM with a question who will not wait until nine. The person who will answer a conversation but will not fill in a nine-field form. The ten questions you answer by email every week — price, timeline, do you work with businesses like mine — that a well-briefed assistant can answer in seconds while you sleep. When it works, it multiplies the enquiries a site produces from the visitors it already has. It does not create visitors; a site with a handful of monthly visitors needs traffic first.

The rules that make it safe

It knows only what you gave it. Your services, your prices, your FAQs, your policies. Not the internet. If asked something outside that, it says so and offers to get a person, rather than guessing plausibly.

It quotes only published prices. If a price is on your site, it can say it. If not, it says a quote follows a conversation. It never rounds, estimates or “roughly”s.

It never promises outcomes. No rankings, no timelines it cannot know, no “guaranteed”. It can describe what you do; it cannot commit you.

It says what it is. Visitors should know they are talking to an assistant. They generally do not mind; they mind being deceived.

It knows when to stop selling. Someone asking how to reset their own password does not need a $350 quote. A good assistant helps and moves on.

Taking a lead properly

Ask for a name, an email, and what they need — one at a time, conversationally, not as a form dumped into the chat. Offer budget and timeline as tap-to-answer choices so nobody types “$3,500 to $7,500” on a phone keyboard. Ask for a phone number as optional, not demanded. When it has enough, tell the visitor plainly that a person will follow up and when, email them a confirmation, email you the summary, and save the transcript. If the AI ever fails to file the lead, the system behind it should catch the email address in the conversation and file it anyway; a lead that vanished because a model forgot a step is the worst outcome of all.

Keeping it honest over time

Read the transcripts every month. They tell you what visitors actually ask, which is also what your website is failing to answer. Tighten anything that drifted. Update it when prices or services change; an assistant quoting last year’s price is worse than none. Rate-limit it so a bot cannot run up your bill.

What ours is

The assistant in the corner of this page is built on those rules — you can test it now. We offer the same to clients as a service: setup and training for $750, then $79 a month for hosting, model costs for up to 1,000 conversations, a monthly transcript review and updates as your services change, or $49 a month on any care plan. Every lead it takes is emailed to you and to the visitor, and saved in your WordPress dashboard where you can reply from the same screen.