How to Set Up an AI Chatbot for Your Website

Most people picture 'setting up a chatbot' as something that needs a developer, a project plan, and a few weeks of back-and-forth. For a small business, it doesn't have to be that. A guided setup can take you from nothing to a working assistant on your website in a single sitting — no code, no technical background required. Here's what that actually looks like, step by step.

Step 1: Tell it what kind of business you run

The first step is simply picking your business type from a list — a dental practice, a salon, a trades business, a restaurant, and so on. This isn't cosmetic: it shapes the suggestions the assistant makes later, from the kind of FAQs it proposes to the tone that tends to fit. You're not locked into the choice — everything here can be changed afterwards.

Step 2: Point it at your website

Give it your website address and it reads through your existing pages, pulling out what it can find — your business name, a description, opening hours, contact details, and any FAQs already on your site. This is the step that removes most of the manual typing: instead of writing your business information from scratch, you're reviewing and correcting what was already found. If you don't have a website yet, you can skip this step entirely and fill in the basics by hand.

Step 3: Review the knowledge base it built

Whatever was found on your website — or whatever you've added manually — turns into a set of question-and-answer pairs the assistant will actually use to answer visitors. This is the point to check accuracy: fix anything that's out of date, add questions you know customers ask that weren't on the site, and remove anything that doesn't apply. The assistant only ever answers from this knowledge base, so time spent here directly shapes what it can and can't help with once it's live.

Step 4: Set its name, greeting and tone

Give the assistant a name, choose a greeting message, and pick a tone — friendly, professional, or more casual — along with whether it should address visitors formally or informally. A dental practice or a law firm usually reads better with a professional tone; a café or an online shop often suits something more relaxed. This step also creates the assistant behind the scenes, so from here on you're working with a real, saved configuration rather than a preview.

Step 5: Try it yourself before anyone else does

Before it goes anywhere near your actual visitors, you get to test it directly — ask it the questions a customer would ask and see exactly how it responds, using the knowledge base and tone you just set up. This is the moment to catch anything that reads oddly or answers a question in a way you didn't expect, while it's still just you looking at it.

Step 6: Embed it on your site

The last step is adding a short snippet of code to your website — one line, dropped in near the bottom of your page template. If you use a common platform like WordPress, Wix, Jimdo or Shopify, you get instructions specific to that platform; on WordPress, for example, that means adding it via your theme editor or a header/footer plugin. If someone else manages your site, you can send the snippet straight to them instead of touching the code yourself. Nothing about your existing website changes — the chat window simply appears on top of it.

How long this actually takes

If you already have a website to scan and know roughly what tone you want, the guided setup itself is genuinely quick — a handful of steps. Where it takes longer is step 3, reviewing the knowledge base: the more care you put into checking and adding questions there, the better the assistant performs once it's live, and that's worth doing properly rather than rushing. Either way, everything you set can be changed afterwards — nothing here is a one-way decision.

What's deliberately not part of this flow

Connecting a booking calendar — so the assistant can offer real appointment slots through Calendly or Cal.com — isn't one of the guided setup steps. It's a separate configuration you add afterwards, once the assistant is live and you've decided how you want appointments to work. The same goes for finer customisation like widget colours or advanced handover rules: the guided setup gets you a working, on-brand assistant fast, and the rest is there when you're ready for it, not forced into the first sitting.