Add website chat that knows your business

Someone looking at your product page has a question: will this work with the app they already have? The answer may be in your setup guide, but they have not found it yet. A useful chat widget can answer the question, point them to the relevant page, and keep the conversation available when they return.

For that to work, the assistant needs your business information and a way to handle questions that need a person. The chat bubble is the visible part. The facts, source updates, saved conversations, and staff replies make it useful.

Start with the information customers need

Give the assistant the details that help someone make a decision: what you sell, what it costs, what is included, what setup requires, and how your policies work. Include links to the pages where a visitor can read more.

Specific answers depend on specific information. If your software needs a persistent database or your service is available only in certain places, put that in the business facts. A visitor deciding whether the product fits should be able to get that answer before buying.

Keep a clear owner for those facts. When a price, requirement, or policy changes, updating the website and the assistant's information should be part of the same job.

Give visitors a source they can follow

A source link lets someone check the details, read an installation guide, or compare options without asking the assistant to repeat the entire page. It also gives your team a practical way to check an answer: does the linked page actually support what the assistant said?

Source links help people evaluate an answer. AI can still make mistakes, so test the questions your customers ask and review answers that sound more confident than the supplied facts justify.

Try a question your information cannot answer. The assistant should acknowledge the gap and offer a useful next step. A plausible guess about your refund policy can create a support problem that a simple admission would have avoided.

Keep the information fresh

Choose an update method that fits how you maintain your site. You might edit business facts in a protected console, maintain a local JSON file, or provide an approved HTTPS feed.

Whichever method you choose, check that updates reach the installed service. If a source becomes stale or cannot be validated, the assistant needs to handle that failure visibly. Continuing to answer from an old price list can be worse than briefly asking a visitor to check the current product page.

Useful controls belong in the installed chat service. Your staff should be able to update the business information and see its status without depending on a coding agent to keep the assistant informed every day.

Give a person a way to continue the conversation

Some questions need judgment or account-specific help. Let the visitor leave a message for your team and keep it with the conversation that prompted it. Staff can read the context, reply from a private inbox, and have the visitor find the reply in the same chat.

Explain how replies arrive. In Website Chat, visitors use Check replies to read staff responses. Email and push notifications would require a separate connection. That small detail matters to someone waiting for an answer.

Saved conversations also need deliberate retention and deletion choices. Decide how long to keep them and make the visitor's delete option easy to find.

Add the widget with the source code included

Website Chat includes an embeddable widget, business-specific answers with source links, saved conversations, visitor message handoff, and a private staff inbox. Mallow, the assistant on Helpful Mods, is built on this mod. Ask it a question about a product or its requirements to see the experience.

The service runs on Node.js 24 or later with a persistent SQLite database, one process per database, and your own OpenAI API account. Your agent connects it to the websites you choose and configures the business facts, retention period, and estimated daily AI budget. Hosting and OpenAI usage are paid through your own accounts.

Test a pricing question, an unanswered question, a source update, and a staff reply. Restart the service and check that the saved conversation is still available. Those checks tell you more about the finished feature than a greeting in a chat bubble.

Your first Helpful Mod is $99, and each additional different mod is $75. You get the full source, agent setup instructions, and verification tests, with no Helpful Mods subscription.

See Website Chat, try the sample workspace, or ask Mallow a question.

Further reading

• How to install a Helpful Mod with your coding agent