Dotance Chat – AI Chatbot Trained on Your Own Content, with Sources & Lead Capture

Description

Most AI chatbots put a general-purpose model behind a chat box. Ask one about your prices and it will happily make a number up, because it has never read your pricing page.

Dotance Chat reads the pages you have already published and answers visitors from those pages alone. Every answer lists the pages it came from, so a visitor — and you — can check it. If nothing on your site answers the question, Dotance Chat says so instead of guessing.

What it does

• Answers from your own content. Posts, pages and any other public post type you choose are split into passages and indexed once. A question is matched against those passages, and only the ones that actually match are given to the AI.
• Shows its sources. Each answer carries links to the pages it was built from.
• Pinned answers. Prices, refund terms, opening hours — pin the exact wording and Dotance Chat gives it back verbatim, before any AI is asked. Instant, and free to serve.
• Lead capture. When a conversation turns into buying intent, Dotance Chat asks for a name and email inside the chat and emails the lead to you.
• The Questions report. Every question your content could not answer, grouped and counted. It is a list of the pages your visitors wish you had written.
• The conversation log. Every question and answer, searchable, with one visitor’s whole conversation on one screen. Records can delete themselves after a number of days you choose.
• Privacy tools. Dotance Chat answers WordPress’s own personal-data export and erasure requests, and suggests wording for your privacy policy.
• A spend guard. Set a monthly token budget and the chat stops rather than running up a bill.
• Your own AI key. Google Gemini, OpenAI or Anthropic. A free Gemini key is enough for a small site.
• Built for ordinary hosting. No Node, no vector database, no background workers. The chat widget is vanilla JavaScript in a shadow root, so your theme cannot break it and it cannot break your theme.

Dotance Chat Pro

Dotance Chat Pro is a separate add-on for sites that want more:

• The content-gap loop: pick any question from the Questions report and Dotance Chat Pro drafts the answer from your own content, ready to pin or save as a draft post.
• A full design customiser with a live preview.
• Lead webhooks for your CRM, Zapier or Make.
• CSV export of the Questions report.
• Custom AI endpoints — OpenRouter, Groq, or a model on your own server.

Everything listed under “What it does” above is in this free plugin, with no limits.

External services

Dotance Chat connects to the AI provider you select on its Settings screen, using the API key you enter there. It connects to one provider for answering and one for indexing (they can be the same). Nothing is sent until you have entered a key.

What is sent, and when:

• When you build or update the index: the text of each published page or post that is indexed, in passages, to the indexing provider.
• When you save a pinned answer: the pinned question, to the indexing provider, so similar questions can match it.
• When a visitor asks a question: the question goes to the indexing provider to find matching passages. If any match, the question, those passages and the earlier messages from that visitor’s current conversation go to the answering provider. A question that matches a pinned answer word for word is answered without contacting any provider.
• When you press “Test keys” or save a new key: a request that lists the provider’s models, to check the key works. No content is sent.

The lead form’s name, email and phone fields, and visitors’ IP addresses, are never sent to an AI provider. Anything a visitor types into a question is sent as part of that question.

Google Gemini API (generativelanguage.googleapis.com), provided by Google.
Terms of service · Privacy policy

OpenAI API (api.openai.com), provided by OpenAI.
Terms of use · Privacy policy

Anthropic API (api.anthropic.com), provided by Anthropic.
Commercial terms · Privacy policy

Technical details