Frequently asked questions
About the product
What is SiteMesh?
A tool that turns your existing website content, documents and files into an embeddable AI chat widget. It indexes what you give it and answers visitor questions using only that material, so replies stay grounded in your own information.
How does it stop the chatbot making things up?
Every answer is built from retrieved pieces of your indexed content. Outside knowledge is excluded by design, so when your knowledge base does not cover a question, the bot says so rather than guessing.
What content can it be trained on?
A website or sitemap, PDF, DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX, CSV and TXT uploads, YouTube video transcripts, and raw pasted text.
How long does setup take?
About five minutes to a working chatbot on your site. Crawling a large site takes longer, but you can test as soon as the first pages are indexed.
Do I need to know how to code?
No. Everything is done from the dashboard. The only technical step is pasting one script tag into your website, and there is a guide for each major platform.
Setup and installation
How do I add the chatbot to my website?
Paste a single script tag before the closing </body> tag. It works with
WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, Wix, Squarespace, React, Next.js, Vue, Astro and
plain HTML.
Will it clash with my site's design?
No. The widget renders inside an isolated container, so your CSS cannot restyle it and its styles cannot leak into your page.
Will it slow my site down?
No. The script loads asynchronously and never blocks your page from rendering.
The widget is not showing up
Usually one of: the snippet is not on the page, a field in it is empty, your domain is not in the key's allowed list, or you are looking at a cached page.
Answers and content
Does it keep answers up to date when my site changes?
Not automatically unless you tell it to. Content is indexed when you crawl it. You can refresh a single source, recrawl everything, or schedule automatic re-indexing daily, weekly or monthly.
The bot says it does not know something that is on my site
Check the crawl summary first — the page may have been skipped or failed. If the content is inside an image or a scanned PDF, it is invisible to the chatbot. The reliable fix is to add the answer as a pasted-text source.
Can it answer in other languages?
Yes. The chatbot replies in whatever language the visitor writes in. Quality depends on your indexed content, so index translated pages if you have a genuinely multilingual audience.
Can I control what it says?
Yes — persona, tone, welcome message, quick prompts and the full system prompt are all editable. Add to the default prompt rather than replacing it, so the grounding rules survive.
Which AI model does it use?
gpt-4o-mini by default, with gpt-4o available for harder reasoning. Model
choice matters less than most people expect — retrieval quality dominates.
Conversations and leads
Can a human take over a conversation?
Yes. The dashboard shows live sessions in real time. You can take over any conversation and reply yourself, and the bot stays silent until you hand the visitor back. Visitors who ask for a person also trigger an email notification.
Can I collect contact details?
Yes. Turn on lead capture and choose which of name, email and phone to ask for. Details are attached to the conversation that produced them.
Can I see what people have asked?
Yes — live as it happens, and in the conversation history afterwards. This is the single best guide to what your knowledge base is missing.
Security and privacy
Can other websites embed my chatbot?
No. Widget keys are scoped to the domains you allow, so requests from any other origin are rejected.
Is it safe that the API key is visible in my page source?
Yes. It is a deliberately public credential: scoped to one chatbot, restricted to your domains, rate-limited and revocable. It grants no access to your dashboard, your account or your data.
Is my content used to train AI models?
No. It is indexed so your own chatbot can search it. That is all.
What do I need to tell my visitors?
That the site uses an AI assistant, that conversations are recorded and may be read by staff, what happens to any contact details collected, and how to request deletion.
Plans and billing
Is there a free plan?
Yes — one chatbot, 100 indexed pages, 1,000 messages per month, and full widget customisation. Paid tiers raise those limits.
→ Plans
What happens if I run out of messages?
The widget stops answering and visitors receive an error. Upgrade, or wait for the allowance to reset.
→ Plans
Do paid plans unlock extra features?
No. Every plan includes the full widget. Tiers differ by volume, not by holding features back.
Automation
Is there an API?
Yes. Everything the dashboard does is available over a REST API — creating chatbots, adding content, reading leads.
Can I build my own chat interface?
Yes. The widget endpoints are documented, including the streaming message endpoint.