AI Chatbot With Sources: How to Make Every Answer Checkable
A chatbot is only useful if people can trust it. When an answer says your return window is 30 days, the visitor should be able to see where that came from, and so should you. An AI chatbot with sources builds each answer from your own content and shows the page or file behind every sentence. Here is how to set one up.
Step 1: Give it your own content
Add the pages, files and text your visitors ask about: website pages, PDFs, Word files, pasted text, Google Drive documents and saved answers. This is the only material the chatbot answers from. By default it does not browse the internet, so the sources you add are the whole story.
Step 2: Keep "Answer only from knowledge" on
This setting is on by default. With it on, the chatbot answers only from the numbered sources it was given, and it is told never to state a price, fee, date, limit, policy, guarantee, feature or availability that your sources do not state. If you turn it off, the chatbot may explain general ideas in its own words, kept apart from your facts and without a source.
Step 3: Check what a source looks like
Each sentence that uses your content carries a number like [1]. A source shows the page title, the heading of the section it came from, and a link to the page. For a PDF it can show the page number. When the answer is one of your saved answers, it is marked as an answer from your team. Several passages from the same document share one number, so the visitor sees each document once and your team can see exactly which page the chatbot relied on.
Step 4: Decide what happens when it does not know
When your content has no answer, the chatbot says so instead of guessing. You choose the next step: show a contact form, apologize and carry on, or hand the chat to a person when handoff is available on your plan and turned on. You can write the message visitors see, so it sounds like you. Replies that say "I don't know" use no AI credits.
Step 5: Fill the gaps with saved answers
When you see a question go unanswered, add a saved answer. The next visitor who asks it gets that answer, marked as coming from your team. The readiness score helps here: it writes test questions from your content, shows which ones fail, and gives a one-click way to add the missing answer or open the source behind it.
Step 6: Test it like a visitor
Open the live test and ask your three most common questions. Then ask one your website does not answer, and see how the chatbot handles it. If an answer is wrong, you know which page to fix, because every sentence shows what it relied on.
See it on your own content
Add your website and watch your chatbot answer with sources: Cited answers.