How to train an AI chatbot on your website in 10 minutes
Your website already holds most of the answers your customers are looking for. The trouble is that visitors rarely want to dig through five pages to find a return window or a shipping cost. An AI assistant trained on that content lets them simply ask.
Here's how to set one up with CustGPT, start to finish.
1. Decide what the assistant should know
Before you import anything, spend a minute listing the questions you answer most often. Look at your inbox, your live chat history or the notes your support team keeps. You'll usually find the same ten or fifteen topics coming up again and again: pricing, delivery, returns, account access, opening hours, compatibility.
This list becomes your test script later, so keep it handy.
2. Import your website
Create a chatbot and paste your homepage address. CustGPT follows the links on your site, reads each page and stores the useful text. Navigation menus, footers and cookie banners are stripped out so the assistant focuses on real content.
If your site has a sitemap (most do, usually at /sitemap.xml), importing it is even more precise: you get exactly the pages you've listed, nothing more.
Tip: if parts of your site are out of date, remove those pages from your sources afterwards. The assistant can only be as accurate as the material it reads.
3. Add what isn't on your website
Plenty of useful knowledge never makes it onto a public page. Upload PDFs such as product manuals, price sheets or policy documents, or paste internal notes directly as text.
For questions where the wording really matters (refund exceptions, legal wording, anything sensitive), write a custom answer. These hand-written replies are ranked above everything else when a matching question comes in.
4. Give it a personality
Under Settings, write a few lines of instructions. Keep them short and concrete:
- Who the assistant is ("You're the helper for a family-run bike shop")
- How it should sound ("warm, brief, no jargon")
- What it should always or never do ("suggest booking a service for repair questions", "never quote delivery dates")
Then set a fallback message for questions your content doesn't cover. A good fallback points people to a human instead of leaving them stuck.
5. Test with real questions
Open the Playground and work through the list from step one. For each answer, ask yourself:
- Is it correct?
- Is it complete enough to act on?
- Does it link to the right page?
When an answer misses, the fix is almost always in the content: add a custom answer, upload the missing document, or refresh a page that has changed.
6. Put it on your site
Copy the one-line script from the Embed tab and paste it before the closing </body> tag on your site. The chat bubble appears in the corner right away. Most website builders (WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, Squarespace and others) have a "custom code" or "footer scripts" setting where it fits neatly.
Keep it fresh
Treat your assistant like any other page on your site. Re-crawl after big updates, skim the Conversations tab each week for questions it struggled with, and turn those gaps into new content. After a month or two, you'll have one of the most accurate help channels you run.