In this post, I’ll show you how to build a custom chatbot for your website — in just 10 minutes.
This chatbot learns everything on your website and answers questions based on that content.
It’s a different level from the bots just a year or two ago. This one can actually answer to pretty much anything.
Let’s go!
Disclaimer: This post has affiliate links at no cost to you.
#1 Sign Up to ChatBase
To start creating your AI chatbot, head over to ChatBase.co.
Then, sign up.
You can use Google to save you from clicks and having to recall another password.
#2 Create New AI Chatbot
Hit “New AI Agent” to start creating your customer support AI chatbot:
#3 Pick Data Sources
Choose the data source (or data sources) for your AI agent.
This AI needs a data source — basically the info it’ll use to answer stuff.
In Chatbase, you can pick from:
- Files: Upload PDFs, Word docs, or text files
- Text: Just paste in whatever text you want it to know
- Website: Give it a URL, it’ll scrape the content
- Q&A: Add custom question-answer pairs
- Notion: Connect your Notion workspace and sync pages
I went with the website option.
This means that the AI reads through my entire website and learns what it says on every single page.
It’s almost like a custom ChatGPT for your website.
Here’s the site I will use in this example. It’s called bloggersgoto.com—which is my blogging/SEO site where I teach blogging.
The reason I wanted to create an AI chatbot for this site is that I want to automate boring, repetitive questions that I get. After all, people could just find answers to these questions on my site.
To load your website as a data source, you need to include your sitemap. To do this, just enter the URL of the website you want to train this bot with.
If you want to do this for just one specific page, you can enter a link to the page in the Individual Link section. However, if you do this, anything that’s not found on that specific page is not included in the training data!
#4 Create Agent
Once you’ve specified your data source, hit “Create agent”.
This trains the AI chatbot based on the information found on the site.
#5 Test It First
You can always try the chatbot easily with the playground option.
When you ask questions of the chatbot, it will answer based on the information on the site you provided it with.
#6 Add More Data (Optional)
I tested my AI chatbot once and I didn’t like the answers that much. That’s because I had accidentally included just the homepage of my website as the data source.
To get better answers, I ensured the AI read all my pages on my website (there are over 140 blog posts there).
To do this, I entered my website URL in the Crawl Links and Sitemap sections.
As I did this, the AI started to go through all the pages on my website. It even shows you the links it has discovered.
After a couple of minutes, I started to get way better answers from the chatbot.
For example, here I asked the AI what should bloggers expect to make:
The AI chatbot gave a perfect answer based on one of my blog posts that I have published on the site. It absolutely nailed it.
This is epic!
I also wanted to know if the AI could answer a question about who is Artturi Jalli (that is, me).
Once again, the AI nailed it.
Without consuming my website, it obviously wouldn’t know the answer because I’m not a popular figure.
But because the AI had just read my entire website, it could easily find the answer.
#7 Check Answer Sources
By the way, if you want to get an idea where the answer came from, you can always click “Show sources”.
This way you can see from where the AI got the data and that it’s not hallucinating.
This is epic if you ask me.
So, just to recap, this AI chatbot was built in 5 minutes. Yet it remembers everything it saw on my website and gives a perfect answer.
But now, how do you use it? Can you customize the outlook? How can you add it as a chat bubble on a website?
No worries, I will show you all of that in just a second. But before we do that, let’s go through a couple of useful features.
#8 Check Analytics & Data
As the admin of your AI chatbot, you get to see your chat logs. This shows you all the conversations that your users have had with your AI chatbot.
You also get to see analytics, which shows you statistics on how many chats, messages, rated messages, and more have taken place.
You’ll also see from which corners of the world people have interacted with your chatbot.
Also, remember that your website is not the only source. You can add files, text, Q&A, and Notion files too. You can combine all of these to form an even more powerful AI chatbot.
#9 Create Actions
If your website or business has customer data or any other useful database, you can also connect that with ChatBase.
This way, you can manage your Slack conversations, Stripe payments, and all that stuff automatically with your customers in the chatbot.
Of course, you can also create custom actions too.
Just give it a name and description as to when the AI chatbot should call this action.
For example, if your user asks the chatbot to show invoice history, you can configure it to do so here.
Then connect the database/API to the action for the chatbot to fetch the data.
If you’re just creating a good old chatbot on a traditional website, you obviously don’t need to do all of this.
But if you have a lot of customers and data, configurations, and customizations like this can help.
#10 Publish
Once your AI chatbot looks good, it’s time to publish it. You can do this in the Connect tab. Just hit “Make Public” to publish your bot.
#11 Add to Your Site
You can add the chatbot to your website.
To do this, copy the code in the “On the site” section:
For example, if your website uses Elementor, open up the editor and choose an HTML block:
Then copy-paste the code that ChatBase gave you:
Then hit “Publish” and load your site. You should see a chatbot like this on the right corner of the site:
Isn’t that awesome? Just to make sure everything works as expected, feel free to have a conversation with your chatbot.
#13 Change Outlook
Last but not least, if you’re not happy with the outlook of the bot, you can always tweak it in the Settings tab of ChatBase.
#14 Enjoy!
So that’s your quick guide on how to build an AI chatbot from scratch in just 10 minutes on your website.
Isn’t that handy?
The chatbot will remember every word and piece of content on your site and give answers based on that.
