How to choose a website AI assistant
A feature list will not tell you whether an assistant can answer your visitors' questions safely. The useful test is to give each option the same sources, questions, and failure cases, then compare what happens.
Before choosing a website AI assistant, write down the job it must perform. A support assistant, a pre-sales assistant, and a Search Center may use similar technology, but they need different sources, controls, and measures of success.
Define the decision first
Complete these statements before requesting demos:
- Visitors need help with: [three specific tasks]
- The approved sources are: [pages, docs, FAQs, or files]
- The content that must remain private is: [content or systems]
- The sources change: [daily, weekly, or rarely]
- A successful answer must: [state the answer, cite a source, or guide a next step]
- An unsupported question should: [decline, ask for context, or send the visitor to a person]
This prevents a polished generic demo from replacing your actual requirements.
Use the same evaluation tasks for every option
| Criterion | Test task | Pass condition | Red flag |
|---|---|---|---|
| Source control | Include one section and exclude an archive path | Only approved pages can support answers | The vendor cannot show what was indexed |
| Citations | Ask a policy question and open its source | The link supports the specific claim | Sources are absent or only point to a homepage |
| Missing information | Ask about an undocumented capability | The assistant states that the source does not answer it | It fills the gap with a confident guess |
| Freshness | Change a controlled source and run the documented refresh | The answer changes after the source is processed | Updates require rebuilding the whole experience |
| Security | Test the assistant from an allowed and disallowed origin | The configured access rule is enforced | Public and private content boundaries are unclear |
| Analytics | Find a weak answer in conversation history | You can inspect the question, answer, time, and feedback | Only aggregate traffic is available |
| Deployment | Install the generated embed in a test page | The documented setup works without undisclosed dependencies | The demo uses a different deployment path |
| Cost | Model your storage, model usage, and crawl traffic | The estimate uses published units and limits | Important usage dimensions are omitted |
Score each criterion only after performing the task. A checkbox based on a sales answer is not evidence.
Weight the criteria for your situation
A documentation team may give retrieval quality, citations, and refresh behavior the highest weight. An agency managing several client sites may care more about source separation, allowed origins, repeatable deployment, and account limits. An ecommerce team may prioritize product-field coverage and update cadence.
Use a simple score from 0 to 3:
- 0: unavailable or not demonstrated
- 1: possible only with a manual workaround
- 2: works with a clear limitation
- 3: meets the requirement in the test
Multiply the score by a weight from 1 to 3. Keep the notes beside the number; the reason matters more than the total.
Verify Seekdown against the same checklist
Seekdown uses memory datasets as the source layer, data capture jobs and uploads to fill them, and assistants or Search Centers as the visitor-facing experience. It can show source links, apply allowed-origin settings, retain conversation history, and schedule supported website capture jobs.
Those are product facts to test, not reasons to skip evaluation. Use a small dataset with known answers, exclude one path deliberately, ask an unsupported question, and review the resulting conversation in Analytics.
Questions to settle before purchase
- Who owns the source content after launch?
- How will the team know a capture or upload failed?
- Which person reviews unsupported or negatively rated answers?
- How will private material be kept out of public datasets?
- What happens when a plan limit is reached?
- Can the team export the information it needs?
- Is the documented workflow acceptable without a custom integration?
Choose the option that passes the important tests with understandable tradeoffs. A longer feature list cannot compensate for weak source control or answers that nobody can verify.