AnswerRails

AnswerRails adds a trustworthy AI customer service assistant to your WordPress site — a chat widget that answers visitor questions, grounded in your own content, with the guardrails and privacy controls a business needs.

It keeps AI assistants on track and on message: answers are grounded in your knowledge base, kept within configurable limits, and logged according to your privacy policy.

AnswerRails is a complete, compliance-first assistant. Any AI provider, any model in the catalogue, using your own API key. Answers cite their sources.

The assistant admits what it doesn’t know instead of inventing something. Every visitor message is checked for abuse before it reaches your provider — with no off-switch. And it includes every privacy and compliance control it has: conversation logging modes, retention, consent receipts, browser-storage policy, auto-clear, and full GDPR data-request tooling.

AnswerRails Pro is a separate plugin that adds further knowledge source types, conversation analytics, and human-handoff escalations. It is listed further down.

Key features

• Front-end chat widget — clean, accessible UI with configurable title, subtitle, avatar, welcome message, and a configurable floating launcher. Themeable to your brand (with automatic dark mode and contrast-checked colours), draggable and resizable on desktop, and a full-screen takeover experience on phones.

• Accessible to every visitor (WCAG 2.2 AA) — because the widget lives on YOUR site, its accessibility is part of your site’s conformance, and we build for that: screen-reader announcements for every answer and status change, full keyboard operation, proper dialog and conversation-log semantics, visible focus, reduced-motion support, and an admin contrast guard so your brand colours never make the chat unreadable. Tested with a screen-reader protocol on real assistive technology.

• Any provider, any model, your own key — OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, or Mistral, with every model in the catalogue included. New installs default to Mistral’s free tier, which is well suited to evaluating AnswerRails; for a live site we recommend a paid model — pay-as-you-go on Mistral, or credit on OpenAI or Anthropic — because free mode has no reserved capacity. Usage is billed to your own provider account; there is no middleman.

• Knowledge grounding — answer from your own documents and content rather than generic model knowledge. Load your existing site content in bulk: a multi-select picker adds pages and posts to the knowledge base with search, filters, and per-item progress — the fastest route from a fresh install to grounded answers (pages, posts, documents and JSON; WooCommerce product and external-URL sources are in AnswerRails Pro, a separate plugin). Items sourced from posts, pages, products, or URLs stay current automatically: edits propagate on save or within the hourly sync, and if a source disappears the item shows a visible “Source unavailable” state and is withdrawn from answers rather than serving stale text indefinitely. Prefer an approved snapshot? Any tracked item can be switched to Manual — pinned to the copy you vetted — and back again, at any time.

• Answers that show their working — grounded answers cite their sources, shown to the visitor as a “Sources” list under the reply (with an owner toggle).

• Honest by design — when your knowledge base can’t support an answer, the assistant says so plainly instead of inventing one or over-promising; structured, policy-checked responses are how citations and honesty flags come back reliably. A reliability guardrail backs this up deterministically: an answer that invents a link to a page on your own site that doesn’t exist is never served, and substantive answers with no knowledge-base backing are declined rather than improvised.

• Links that tell the truth — the assistant carries a live index of your site’s real published pages, so it links only to pages that actually exist and can honestly say when you don’t have something. A mistyped internal link is repaired to the real page when exactly one confident match exists; a link that misrepresents its target is stripped before serving; an invented link still means the answer is never served. You control how much of the index is shared per answer.

• Cross-reference tables — declare a JSON knowledge item as a cross-reference (surname → clan, SKU → product, synonym → page) and the assistant follows the mapping: when a visitor’s question matches a term, it runs a focused follow-up search on what it maps to before answering. Deterministic — no model decides whether it runs — and it works inside nested documents (pick the section, or several; the rest of the document keeps grounding answers as normal).

• Outage-resilient answers — your knowledge base is also indexed locally in your own WordPress database; if the cloud knowledge-search service has an outage, the assistant automatically falls back to the local index and keeps answering from your content instead of handing visitors off.

• Reliability-focused routing & health dashboard — automatic failover between AI endpoints, plus an at-a-glance system health view: which model is answering, whether knowledge search is healthy, and what happens at each stage of the pipeline — with a one-click test of every service the assistant depends on.

• The complete privacy & compliance layer, all of it included — configurable conversation logging (off / anonymised / identified), retention period, consent prompts, and disclaimer text. Consent is recorded server-side as receipts (including the disclaimer text agreed to), and visitors can withdraw consent from inside the chat as easily as they gave it. You also control what the chat keeps in the visitor’s own browser: storage policy (local, per-session, or nothing at all) and an auto-clear timer. GDPR data-request tooling is built in: WordPress’s own Export/Erase Personal Data flows cover chat data, and a Privacy panel on the Chat Logs screen finds, exports, anonymizes, or deletes everything stored about a person — with an audit trail recording holds, requests, and blocked operations. Uninstalling is clean by default: keys and secrets are always removed, while your content and records are deleted only if you explicitly opt in. Every control listed here is part of this plugin — a compliance control you cannot reach is a compliance control you do not have.

• Spam & abuse protection — optional Google reCAPTCHA v3 on the chat endpoint with a tunable score threshold, plus built-in rate limiting. The reCAPTCHA script only loads for visitors who actually open the chat.

• Visitor-input moderation — every visitor message is checked against your AI provider’s content-safety service BEFORE it reaches the chat model. Abusive messages get a neutral deflection (your brand never engages with abuse, and the content never reaches your provider account — your provider’s terms govern responsibility for end-user content); repeated abuse ends the session; self-harm signals get a supportive signposting reply with a universal helpline link, and the conversation is preserved under a legal hold. Moderation records are fair by design: they name the classifier’s own category, score, and model rather than asserting a verdict about your visitor, and borderline flags deflect without counting toward ending the session. It is always on, and there is no off-switch.

• Operator visibility — chat logs and an activity overview, so you can always see what your assistant told a visitor: every turn shows which pipeline path produced it, and even failed sends (say, during a provider outage) leave a record of exactly what the visitor was shown.

AnswerRails Pro — a separate plugin

AnswerRails Pro is a separate plugin that adds the capabilities listed below. AnswerRails does not require it.

• Catalogue & web grounding — add WooCommerce products and external URLs as knowledge sources, so the assistant can answer from your catalogue and from pages beyond your WordPress site.

• Business Intelligence — one screen for what your conversations are telling you: grounding and deflection analytics, answer-quality distribution, and the knowledge gaps worth filling next.

• Idea capture — product feedback, feature requests, and demonstrated unmet demand extracted from real conversations into a triage ledger.

• Sales-lead detection — buying intent flagged and emailed to your team with the transcript.

• Human-handoff escalations with triggers, customer notifications, email transcripts, and rate limiting.

• Plus the control surfaces that ride with them: a Grounding-depth dial (retrieval uses the top 5 knowledge-base passages per answer — the untuned-safe default; the dial lets you tune depth to your content and your API budget) and moderation tuning (strike limit and the wording of moderation responses — for example, naming the crisis helplines for your region). The protection itself always runs.

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Three AI providers are supported: OpenAI, Mistral (including Mistral’s free tier — the default for new installs, with a guided training opt-out, and a good way to evaluate AnswerRails before you move to a paid model), and Anthropic Claude.

External Services

AnswerRails connects to the third-party services below. No visitor data is sent anywhere until you configure an AI provider API key, and the only AI provider contacted is the one you configure, using your own account.

Your AI provider — OpenAI, Mistral, or Anthropic (one of, your choice; new installs default to Mistral)

Contacted on every answered visitor question. What is sent: the visitor’s message and recent conversation context, the knowledge-base passages selected as relevant to the question, and a hashed session identifier (so any misuse is attributed to the visitor session rather than your account). Visitor messages are also checked against the same provider’s content-safety (moderation) service before any chat model is called.

Usage is billed to your own provider account.

• OpenAI (chat, moderation, and — only if you enable vector search — syncing your knowledge base to a vector store on your own OpenAI account): Terms of Use · Privacy Policy

• Mistral (chat, moderation): Terms · Privacy Policy

• Anthropic (chat, moderation): Commercial Terms · Privacy Policy

Google reCAPTCHA (optional, off by default)

Contacted only if you enable spam protection, and only for visitors who open the chat: Google’s reCAPTCHA script loads in the visitor’s browser, and each chat message is verified server-side with Google (the reCAPTCHA token and the visitor’s IP address are sent to Google’s verification endpoint). Terms · Privacy Policy

Freemius (licensing platform)

Handles licensing and, for paid plans, checkout and billing. Licence status checks go to Freemius. Diagnostic data (your site address, WordPress and PHP versions, and activation events) is sent only if you opt in — the choice is presented on activation and is off unless you accept it.

Terms of Service · Privacy Policy

Your chat logs and consent records stay in your own WordPress database; your API keys are stored in your database and sent only to the provider they belong to.