How answers work.

Askbridge does not answer from general knowledge or the open web. Every answer is written from your own content, and shows where it came from.

The steps behind an answer

1. The visitor asks a question. Before anything else, Askbridge removes personal identifiers from the text: email addresses, phone numbers, postcodes, National Insurance and NHS numbers, card numbers, IBANs, sort codes and account numbers.
2. Askbridge searches your knowledge. It looks through your website pages, files and FAQs, by meaning and by keyword, and picks the most relevant passages.
3. It checks the evidence. If no passage is a good enough match, it does not try to answer (see "When it does not know" below).
4. The AI model writes the answer. The model receives the redacted question, the recent conversation, the chosen passages and your instructions. It is told to answer only from those passages and to treat them as information, not instructions.
5. The answer is checked and shown with sources. Answers that cite nothing, or include links to websites that are not yours, are held back. The visitor sees the answer as it is written, with numbered sources underneath.

Sources

Each number in an answer, such as [1], matches a source listed under it: a page title (with a link to your page) or a file or FAQ title. If an answer has no source, Askbridge will not give it.

When it does not know

Askbridge has a confidence floor. When the best passages are a weak match, or the passages do not actually contain the answer, it says, once:

I can't find that in our information.

and the chat offers a person underneath ("Talk to a person", or a message form when your team is offline).

This is deliberate. A clear "I don't know" is better than a confident guess about your prices or policies. Each of these questions is added to Analytics > Knowledge gaps, so you can add an FAQ.

Links to your pages

When a visitor asks about prices, how to contact you, your services or booking, and your website has that page, the answer comes with a button to it, such as View pricing or Contact us, shown apart from the numbered sources. If your knowledge does not have the answer but has the page, Askbridge points there instead of saying it does not know: "You can find the current plans and prices on our pricing page." It does not then offer a person, though the visitor can still ask for one.

Askbridge only links to pages of your own website that are in your knowledge: pages it read from your site, or files whose page address you gave (see Uploading files). It never makes up an address. A page called "Pricing" or with an address ending in /pricing, /contact, /services or /book is recognised.

When it hands over

Askbridge offers a person when:

• the visitor asks for one (for example "can I speak to someone?")
• it cannot answer confidently, and there is no page of yours to point to
• the visitor marks an answer as not helpful
• the AI has been switched off, or your plan's allowance is used up

If someone on your team is available, the conversation moves to the inbox and the visitor sees who will pick it up. Outside business hours, the visitor can leave their name, email and message instead. See The inbox and handing off.

Keeping answers good

• Fill gaps with FAQs.
• Exclude old or off-topic pages from your website source.
• On Growth and Scale, keep a set of answer checks: questions with the answer you expect. Re-run them after changing your knowledge to make sure nothing has slipped.
• Read a few conversations each week in the inbox.

What the AI model is

Answers are written by an Anthropic Claude model. It runs outside the UK. It never receives the visitor's name, email address or contact details, and your content and conversations are not used to train it. See Privacy and your visitors' data.