Adding an AI assistant means a new piece of software reading your pages and talking to your visitors. Your visitors trust you, not your vendor. Use this checklist before you install anything.
This is practical guidance, not legal advice. Privacy laws differ by country and province; check what applies to you.
What does it read from my pages?
- Does it read only public pages, or could it see logged-in areas?
- Does it ever read form fields, typed text, cookies or browser storage? (It should not.)
- Can I exclude pages or parts of a page?
- Does it respect robots.txt and noindex?
What does it store about visitors?
- Are conversations stored, and for how long?
- Are IP addresses stored as-is, or only in a form that cannot identify someone?
- Is a visitor’s identity on my website ever linked to the chat?
What are visitors told?
- Does the chat say it is an AI assistant?
- Before a visitor shares contact details, are they told what will be shared and with whom?
- Does my own privacy policy mention the assistant? Update it to say what the assistant does on your site.
Sensitive information
If you work in health, legal, finance or another sensitive field, decide up front that the chat is for general questions about your services — not for personal details. Say so in the chat and on your website, and point people to your secure channels instead.
Switching it off
- Can I remove it instantly?
- If I close my account, is what it learned from my website deleted?
How AskAI answers these
We publish our answers on our Security & Privacy page and in the help article What the assistant learns.
The short version: If a vendor cannot answer every question on this list in plain words, wait.