Verifying your website.
Prove a website is yours with a DNS record, a meta tag or a file, so nobody else can put your chat or your knowledge on their site.
Askbridge asks you to prove that each website using your chat is yours. Without this, someone could copy your snippet or add your website as a knowledge source in their own workspace. Owners and admins verify websites under Settings, Domains and installation, in Website verification.
Statuses
- Verified: you have proved you control the website.
- Pending: not verified yet.
- Legacy: added before verification started. It keeps working during a 30-day grace period; verify it before the date shown.
- Failing: the daily check failed. The chat keeps working for 7 days while you fix it, and we email the workspace owner.
- Lapsed: not verified for 7 days in a row, so the chat has stopped there and its pages are not used in answers. Nothing is deleted. Verify it again and it works straight away.
- Development:
localhostand127.0.0.1need no verification for the widget.
Three ways to verify
Choose Verify next to the website, pick one method, add what it shows you, then choose Check now.
| Method | What to add | What it verifies |
|---|---|---|
| DNS record | A TXT record named _askbridge.example.co.uk with the value askbridge-verify=… | The whole domain and every subdomain |
| Meta tag | <meta name="askbridge-verify" content="…"> inside the <head> of your home page | That exact address only |
| File | A text file at /.well-known/askbridge-verify.txt containing the token | That exact address only |
A DNS record is the best choice if you can change your DNS: one record covers www., shop. and any other subdomain. DNS changes can take up to an hour to show.
The meta tag must be in the page's HTML itself. Tags added by Google Tag Manager or other JavaScript cannot be detected, because the check reads the HTML your server sends.
The check uses https:// only, follows at most 3 redirects within the same domain, and waits up to 5 seconds.
Daily checks
We check every verified website once a day. Keep the record, tag or file in place: if you remove it, the website turns Failing, and after 7 days Lapsed.
Two workspaces, one website
Two workspaces can verify the same website, for example an agency and its client. When that happens we email the owner of the workspace that verified it first, so an unexpected claim does not go unnoticed.
Website sources
Answers to visitors use only website sources on verified domains. If you add a website that is not verified yet, Askbridge reads up to 25 pages as a preview that you can try in Test a question. Verify the domain and the full website is read and used in answers.
Reporting misuse
Visitors can report a chat that pretends to be someone else or is harmful. Reports go to Vitalos, who can stop the chat on a website while they look into it.
Still stuck? Email support@vitalos.co.uk and tell us your workspace name.