How to add an AI chatbot to your website in 5 minutes

Most chatbot tutorials start with "first, spin up a vector database." This one does not. You do not need a developer, a DevOps pipeline, or a PhD in AI to add a working chatbot to your website. You need about five minutes and a tab open on your knowledge base.

Here's exactly how Promptly works end-to-end — from signup to widget live on your site — and why it stays under five minutes for most teams.

Step 1: Sign up and point Promptly at your content

After you create your free account, the first screen asks one question: where does your knowledge live? You can paste a website URL, drop in a sitemap.xml link, upload a PDF or DOCX file, or type a few FAQ entries by hand. Most teams do the URL option first because it takes thirty seconds and indexes the entire site automatically.

Promptly crawls your URL the same way a search engine would — following links, reading content, ignoring navigation chrome and footers. Within a minute or two, it has a searchable index of everything you published. If your content changes, a scheduled re-crawl keeps the index fresh without you lifting a finger.

Step 2: Customize the widget to match your brand

Before you install anything, make the widget look like it belongs on your site. The widget customizer gives you three main controls:

• Primary color — paste in your hex code and the widget header, send button, and bot bubbles update in real time.
• Widget style — choose from Minimalist (clean floating button), Modern (rounded card), or Corporate (square edges for enterprise-looking sites).
• Bot name and opening message — set what the widget says the moment it opens. "Hi, I'm Aria — ask me anything about our product." takes ten seconds to type.

You can also configure quick-reply buttons (the pre-set chips that appear under the first message), the widget position on screen, and whether to show or hide the "Powered by Promptly" label on free plans. All changes are reflected in the live preview on the right side of the screen — no save-reload cycle.

Step 3: Copy one script tag

When you are happy with how it looks, go to Widget → Install. You will see a single script tag that looks something like this:

<script src="https://cdn.promptly-assistant.com/widget.js"
  data-widget-id="wgt_abc123"
  async>
</script>

Paste it before the closing tag on any page where you want the widget to appear. On WordPress, that is Appearance → Theme File Editor → footer.php. On Webflow, it is Project Settings → Custom Code → Footer Code. On Shopify, it is Online Store → Themes → Edit Code → theme.liquid.

That is it. Refresh the page. The widget button appears in the corner. Click it. Ask your bot a question about your own site. Watch it answer correctly — and cite the source page it pulled the answer from.

Why citation-backed answers matter

One of the biggest fears about AI chatbots is that they make things up. Promptly addresses this directly: every answer includes a "Sources" section that links to the actual page on your site that the answer came from. If the bot cannot find a reliable answer in your knowledge base, it says so instead of hallucinating a confident-sounding fiction.

This is important for trust. Customers who see a citation can click through to verify. Customers who click through often spend more time on your site. And you, as the site owner, can look at the analytics and see exactly which knowledge gaps are causing the bot to fall back to "I don't know" — then fill those gaps.

What happens after installation

The bot runs 24/7. While you sleep, customers in other time zones get instant answers instead of waiting until your support team is back online. Conversations are logged in the Promptly dashboard so you can review them, spot patterns, and train the bot better over time.

If a customer asks something the bot genuinely can't handle, they can request a handoff to a human. That conversation lands in your team's queue with the full transcript, so whoever picks it up is immediately up to speed.