I build these, so treat this as evidence rather than modesty: most small business websites do not need an AI chatbot, and adding one often makes the site worse.
What a chatbot is actually for
It’s good at one thing — answering the same question at 11pm for the fortieth time this month.
If you genuinely get a high volume of repetitive questions, and the answers are stable and written down somewhere, a chatbot earns its place. Opening hours, what areas you cover, whether you service a particular model, how a process works, where an order is.
That’s the case. It’s narrower than the sales pitch suggests.
When it makes things worse
When your traffic is low. A chatbot on a site getting thirty visits a week is a widget covering your phone number.
When the answer is “it depends”. If every real question needs you to look at photos, measure something, or price a job, a bot will either refuse to answer or invent something. The second one is worse, because a confident wrong answer about price or availability becomes your problem.
When it replaces something better. A bubble that hides your phone number on mobile costs you calls. For urgent trades especially, people want to ring someone, not type.
When nobody maintains it. A bot answering from last year’s pricing is worse than no bot. It doesn’t know it’s out of date and it will keep saying it, cheerfully.
The cheaper fix that usually works
Write the answers on the page.
Genuinely — take the eight questions you actually get asked and answer them in plain text on the relevant page. That fixes the same problem for $0, works without JavaScript, gets indexed by search engines, and gets quoted by AI assistants, which a chatbot’s answers never do because they don’t exist until someone asks.
A good FAQ section outperforms a mediocre chatbot in almost every measurable way. The chatbot just feels more modern.
If you do want one
A few things that separate the ones that work from the ones that get switched off:
- Ground it in your own content, not general knowledge. It should answer from your pages and say “I don’t know, here’s the number” when it can’t.
- Let it say “I don’t know.” A bot allowed to guess will guess about prices.
- Keep the phone number visible anyway. The bot is an addition, not a replacement.
- Read the transcripts monthly. They’re the most honest customer research you will ever get, and the main reason to have one at all.
The honest summary
If you’re getting the same question repeatedly and it has a fixed answer, a chatbot is a reasonable tool and I’ll happily build you one.
If you want one because it feels like falling behind not to have one, put the money into making your phone number easier to find and your eight real answers easier to read. That’s not me talking you out of work — it’s me not selling you something that would end up switched off.