Add an AI Chatbot to Your Website in 15 Minutes

To add an AI chatbot to your website takes about fifteen minutes, and almost every guide spends all of that on the wrong part. Pasting the code is the easy bit. What decides whether the thing is useful or embarrassing is what you feed it, what you tell it to do when it cannot help, and whether you tested it before your customers did.

So this covers the whole job in four steps, with the platform-specific bit reduced to what it actually is: one line, in one place, on every page.

Why add an AI chatbot to your website at all

Worth settling before the work, because the answer decides whether you bother.

The case is not that customers love chat windows. Most do not think about them. The case is that a website is a set of pages organised the way a business thinks, and a customer arrives with a question that crosses three of them. They will not read three pages on a phone at half past nine at night. They will message you, or they will leave.

An assistant collapses that. One question, one answer, from material that was already there.

Three things follow that are easy to underrate.

It works when you are asleep. For most small businesses a meaningful share of enquiries arrive outside working hours, and those are the ones currently answered eleven hours late or not at all.

It captures the ones it cannot help. A visitor who gets "I do not have that, may I take your number" is a lead. The same visitor hitting a contact form is usually gone.

It tells you what your website is missing. Every question it could not answer is a gap, described by a real customer in their own words. After a fortnight that list is a to-do list for the site itself.

And the honest counter-case, because there is one. If your site gets very little traffic, an assistant will sit there doing nothing, and your problem is being found rather than being answered. If your enquiries are nearly all account-specific, such as where an order is, an assistant reading your website cannot help and you need an integration instead. And if nobody will ever read the missed questions list, you will get the answering but none of the compounding.

Step one: give it what you already have

Modern assistants read a website rather than requiring you to type question and answer pairs, which is the single biggest change from chatbots five years ago. Give it your web address and it works through the pages.

Start with the site. Let it read everything, not just the home page. Prices, hours, policies and what is included are spread across pages, and a customer's question routinely crosses three of them.

Add what lives outside the site. A price list, a menu, a rate card, a terms document. Most products accept PDFs and Word files.

Then the part that matters. Write down the answers you have never written down. Every business has ten of these: what a price actually includes, which of your products or rooms is the exception, what happens on a public holiday, whether you deliver to a particular area, what somebody needs to bring.

You know all of them and you have said each a hundred times out loud. None are on your website. Until they are written somewhere, no assistant can answer them, and no amount of installing changes that.

This is the step that decides the outcome, and it is the only one that takes real effort. An hour here is worth more than any other choice you make.

Step two: decide what it does when it cannot help

Before it goes anywhere near your visitors, settle this, because it is the only setting that can cost you money.

It must say plainly that it does not know, rather than producing something that sounds right. An assistant built to be helpful will fill a gap with a confident sentence, and a confident wrong sentence about a refund window becomes a dispute you lose because it appeared on your own website.

It should take a name and a number. A decline that ends the conversation is a customer who leaves. A decline that captures the enquiry is a lead waiting for you in the morning. This is where most of the value is on a small site.

It should hand over to a person on request, quickly and without looping.

Then decide the boundaries for your trade. A clinic refuses anything clinical. A restaurant refuses allergens not written on the menu. A hotel refuses availability. A garage refuses diagnosis. Write yours down, because the assistant will be asked all of them.

Step three: paste one line into your site

Every hosted assistant installs the same way: a single script tag, placed once, so that it appears on every page. It looks like this.

<script src="https://sublexchat.com/widget/v1/loader.js"
        data-key="pk_your_key_here" async></script>

The key is public and belongs in your page source. It is not a password. What stops somebody copying it onto their own site is a domain allowlist held on the server, so the key works on your site and nowhere else.

Where it goes, by platform:

WordPress. Appearance, then Theme File Editor, and into footer.php just before </body>. Safer and easier: use a plugin such as WPCode or your theme's built-in "custom scripts" box, which survives theme updates. If your host offers a header and footer scripts field, use that.

Wix. Settings, then Custom Code, add code to Body End, applied to all pages.

Squarespace. Settings, Advanced, Code Injection, into the Footer box.

Shopify. Online Store, Themes, Edit Code, theme.liquid, before </body>.

Webflow. Project Settings, Custom Code, Footer Code.

Anything else. Look for whatever the platform calls custom code, footer scripts or code injection. If you can add Google Analytics, you can add this in the same place.

One line, one place, every page. If you find yourself pasting it onto individual pages, you are in the wrong box.

Step four: test it before anybody else does

Ten minutes, and most people skip it. Four questions, in this order.

A plain fact. Your opening hours, a price, your address. Everything passes. It only proves the assistant read something.

A fact with an exception in it. Something where the honest answer is "most, but not all". Every business has one: the rooms that are not air conditioned, the service that does not include parts, the area you do not deliver to. Watch whether it notices or smooths over it, because smoothing is what a model does when it is optimising for a sentence that sounds right.

Something your site genuinely does not cover. Whether you can do a birthday cake, whether you open on a bank holiday you have never mentioned. The right answer is a plain admission and an offer to take a number. Any plausible sentence here means stop and fix it.

Ask for a person. Time it. See whether anything actually happens, and whether you can see it afterwards.

The third and fourth are the whole test. There are five checks in more detail if you want to be thorough, and they are worth the extra few minutes on a site that quotes prices.

What to do in the first month

The install is not the end of it, and twenty minutes a month is the difference between an assistant that stays useful and one that quietly goes stale.

Read the questions it could not answer. Every product worth using keeps this list. After a fortnight it is a ranked account of everything missing from your website, written by real customers rather than guessed at. Answer two or three of them each month, on the site itself, and the list gets shorter while your website gets better.

Check it re-reads your site. If you change a price in March, when does the assistant find out? Some products re-crawl on a schedule and some wait to be told. Find out which yours is before it quotes a price you no longer charge.

Look at the transcripts once. Not every day. Once, properly, in the first fortnight. You will learn more about what your customers actually want than from a year of guessing.

What it should cost

Prices in this category vary by more than an order of magnitude for identical usage, mostly because vendors count different things: per seat, per conversation, per resolution, or a flat plan with a quota. The four models and what each does to a bill are worked through separately, and the unit matters more than the headline number.

Two questions settle most comparisons. What exactly is the unit being counted, and what happens when the quota runs out, since a plan that silently bills you is not the same as one that stops.

Sublex Chat's own plans on 5 September 2026 start with a free tier of 25 conversations a month with no card, then 500 conversations at $29 and 2,000 at $79, with the AI included rather than charged separately. If you would rather test on your own site than trust a demonstration, the free plan is the honest way to do it, and what free actually gets you is set out separately.

Frequently asked questions

How long does it take to add an AI chatbot to your website? About fifteen minutes for the install: give it your web address, let it read the pages, add any documents, paste one line. The part that takes longer, and decides how well it works, is writing down the answers that are not currently on your site.

Do I need a developer? No. If you can add Google Analytics to your site, you can add this, and it goes in the same place. On WordPress a plugin such as WPCode avoids touching theme files at all.

Will it slow my website down? It should not noticeably. The loader is small and loads without blocking the page, and the main part should only load when somebody actually opens the chat. If a product cannot tell you its loader size, that is worth asking about, particularly on a site that is already slow.

Is the key in my page source a security risk? No, and it is meant to be there. What protects it is a domain allowlist enforced on the server, so the key only works on the sites you named. Anyone copying it onto their own page gets refused.

Can I train it on my own website content? That is exactly how a modern one works. You give it the web address, it reads the pages, and it answers from them. Older chatbots needed you to type question and answer pairs by hand, which is the thing that made them so much work to maintain.

What happens when it does not know the answer? That depends entirely on the product, which is why it is worth testing before you install. The behaviour you want is a plain admission, a captured phone number, and the question added to a list you can read. The behaviour to avoid is a confident sentence.

I have more than one website. Do I need more than one assistant? Usually yes, one per site, because each assistant should read one business's material and answer only from it. Pointing a single assistant at two unrelated sites gives you one that answers questions about the wrong business. Most plans include more than one assistant for exactly this, and an agency running several client sites should check how many are included before choosing a plan.

Can I remove the vendor's name from the chat window? Usually on a paid plan, and it is worth checking what that costs before you install rather than after a client sees it. On Sublex Chat the badge comes off on the Business plan.

Where to start

Before you install anything, write down the three questions your customers ask most and one question your website genuinely does not answer.

Those four are your test. The first three tell you whether it can read your material. The fourth tells you what it does when it cannot, which is the answer that actually matters and the one no pricing page will give you.