1. Collect real visitor questions
Write down the questions people already ask by email, phone, chat, or search. Start with repeatable facts instead of broad claims about what the assistant should do.
Website owner audit
Audit the website before you add an AI assistant.
A chat widget cannot repair missing, stale, or ownerless information. Use these ten checks to decide whether an assistant can help your visitors and where a human still needs to take over.
Disclosure: this independent checklist includes a SiteMind referral link. If you start a paid subscription through it, I may earn a recurring commission at no extra cost to you. Verify current pricing, limits, privacy terms, and ownership rules on the provider’s official pages before subscribing.
2. Check whether the answers exist
For each question, identify the exact page, policy, or document that supports the answer. If the source is missing, fix the site before blaming the assistant.
3. Assign a content owner
Name the person responsible for prices, availability, hours, services, policies, and other facts that can change after launch.
4. Test stale information
Review an old offer, changed opening hour, discontinued service, or outdated policy. Confirm how quickly a correction reaches the assistant’s answers.
5. Test an unknown question
Ask something the source does not cover. A useful system should make uncertainty visible instead of inventing a confident answer.
6. Keep human handoff obvious
Give visitors a working contact path for sensitive, urgent, unusual, or high-value questions. Test the handoff on both desktop and mobile.
7. Define the privacy boundary
Decide what visitors should never submit and where personal, payment, health, legal, or account information must be handled instead.
8. Check the surrounding site flow
Make sure forms, booking links, analytics, consent notices, accessibility, and page performance still work after the assistant is added.
9. Match usage to the plan
Compare domains, source capacity, question volume, seats, support, renewal pricing, and likely seasonal spikes against the plan you are considering.
10. Document ownership and exit
Record who owns the account, billing, source content, domain, data, and removal process. A trial should not create a new lock-in problem.