You want a chatbot on your site. Not an AI strategy, not a framework. A little window in the corner that answers questions while you sleep.
That takes about ten minutes and no code. Here is the whole thing, including the part most guides skip, which is how to make the bot answer from *your* content instead of confidently making things up about your business.
The one thing you actually need
An API key from an AI provider. That is the step people trip on, so let me be straight about what it is and why it is worth it.
Most chatbot products charge you a monthly subscription and run the AI on their servers with their model at their price. AI Engine works the other way: you open an account with OpenAI, Anthropic or Google, copy a key, and the plugin uses it. Your conversations go from your site to the provider and nowhere else.
The practical difference is the bill. A subscription costs the same whether ten people or nobody talks to your bot. With your own key you pay for what is used, which for a small site is usually a few cents a month. The trade is one extra signup at the start.
You do not need a credit card for a free WordPress plugin, but you will need one at the provider. Set a spending limit there while you are at it.
Getting the bot on the page
- Install **AI Engine** from the WordPress plugin directory and activate it.
- Open **Meow Apps → AI Engine** in the sidebar, and on the Settings tab paste your API key and pick your model.
- Go to the **Chatbots** tab. There is one waiting for you already.
- Give it a name, an avatar and a personality. The personality box is the part worth your time: “You are the friendly assistant for a Kyoto pottery studio. Keep answers short. If you do not know, say so and point to the contact page.”
- Choose where it appears. A popup in the corner sitewide, or a shortcode dropped into one page if you want to try it somewhere quiet first.
Save, open your site in a private window, and talk to it.
That is the free version, and for a lot of sites it is the whole job.
Making it answer from your own content
Here is where most chatbots quietly disappoint you. Out of the box, the bot knows what the model knows. Ask it about your opening hours or your refund policy and it will invent something plausible, which is worse than useless on a business site.
The fix is Knowledge, which is a Pro feature. You point it at your posts, pages and PDFs, it turns them into embeddings, and the bot answers from those instead of guessing. Ask about your refund policy and it quotes your actual refund policy.
This used to mean signing up for a separate vector database. It does not any more. AI Engine now stores embeddings inside your own WordPress database by default, so there is nothing else to configure. Pinecone, Qdrant, Chroma and the OpenAI Vector Store are still there if you outgrow it.
If your bot is going to answer questions about your business rather than the weather, this is the setting that matters most.
Keeping the bill boring
The honest risk with pay-as-you-go is a surprise. AI Engine tracks token spend per user and per query, and lets you set limits, so a bot that goes viral or gets hammered stops rather than quietly running up a bill. Turn the limits on the day you launch, not the day after you read the invoice.
Which model should you pick
For a small support bot, the cheapest current model from any provider is almost certainly enough. Chat about opening hours is not a reasoning problem.
Switch when you have a reason. AI Engine puts OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, Perplexity and OpenRouter behind the same interface, so changing model is a dropdown, not a migration. That matters more than it sounds: this field moves every few months, and you do not want your chatbot tied to whoever was best in the year you built it.
When one of them is down
Providers have outages, and a chatbot that returns an error is worse than no chatbot. Since you are not locked to one provider, you can switch to another in a dropdown and keep going. We track the outages publicly if you want to see how often it actually happens.
What else it does, once the bot is running
The chatbot is the doorway. The same plugin also writes and rewrites content in the editor, generates images into your Media Library, builds AI forms, and turns your site into an MCP server so Claude or ChatGPT can manage it through conversation.
None of that is required today. Start with the bot in the corner. The rest is there when you want it.
