Every AI chatbot for WordPress claims the same things: smart answers, easy setup, more leads. The feature lists are nearly identical, which makes them useless for choosing. These four questions separate the options much faster.
1. Where does your data live?
A hosted widget stores your conversations on someone else’s servers, usually outside the EU. A self-hosted plugin keeps them in your own WordPress database. This is not only a privacy question — it decides whether you can export your history, what happens if the vendor disappears, and whose privacy policy your visitors are agreeing to.
2. How are you billed?
There are three models, and they behave very differently as you grow:
- Per conversation or per message. Cheap to start, and your bill grows exactly when the tool starts working. A successful chatbot becomes an expensive one.
- Per seat or per site, with AI included. Predictable, but you pay a markup on tokens and you are capped.
- Licence plus your own AI key. A fixed cost for the software, and the AI billed to you at cost. More setup, much cheaper at volume, and no cap.
For a small business site, the difference between the models over a year is usually larger than any feature difference.
3. What does it know, and how does it find out?
This is the one that decides answer quality. Ask specifically:
- Can it read your whole site — pages, products, PDFs — or only a few URLs you paste in?
- Does it re-read content when you edit it, automatically?
- Does it retrieve the relevant passage per question, or stuff a fixed summary into every prompt?
- Can you see which passages produced an answer?
A tool that cannot show you why it said something cannot be debugged when it says something wrong. See what a RAG chatbot actually is for why retrieval is the whole game.
4. What happens when it cannot help?
Every chatbot fails on some questions. The good ones fail honestly: they say they do not know, they log the question so you can fix it, and they offer a human. The bad ones invent an answer, which costs you a customer and possibly a complaint.
Ask to see the handoff flow, and ask what happens outside business hours.
The features that are worth checking
- Multilingual answers if you have any international traffic — and whether that means a translated interface or genuinely answering in the visitor’s language.
- WooCommerce if you sell: can it recommend actual products with live prices, or only talk about them?
- An analytics view of failed questions. This is the single most useful screen in any chatbot, and many do not have it.
Questions
Do I need a chatbot at all?
If you answer the same handful of questions by email every week, yes — that is exactly the work it removes. If your traffic is low and every enquiry is bespoke, a good contact form serves you better.
Can I move my content between tools later?
Your website content, yes — it is yours. Q&A pairs and conversation history often cannot be exported from hosted tools, so check before you invest time in curating them.