Website Content for an AI Chatbot: Prepare the Text

Take this paragraph from the shipping page of an imaginary shop: "Orders usually go out quickly, and larger items may take a bit longer. Free delivery applies on bigger orders during sales." A visitor asks the site's AI helper, "Is delivery free?" What should it say?

It has to guess. "Bigger" is not an amount, "sales" is not a date, and "quickly" is not a time. The helper works only from the words on the page, so a vague page leaves it room to be wrong. This guide is about taking that room away.

What you need

A short list of questions visitors really ask, taken from your inbox or your search log. The pages that answer them most often: shipping, returns, pricing, opening hours. A text editor, and the ability to publish changes. An hour is enough for a first pass on a small site.

Steps

1. Ask your questions first. Put each one to the helper, or read your pages as if you were it. Mark every question where the answer needs a guess. Those pages come first.
2. One claim per paragraph. "Orders ship in two days and returns are free" holds two facts in one sentence, and a helper (or a person skimming) may keep one and drop the other. Split them, each with its own paragraph or short heading.
3. Replace vague words with values. Swap "quickly" for a number of working days, "bigger orders" for an amount, "during sales" for dates. If the value changes over time, say when it was last confirmed, for example "as of October 2026".
4. Use one full name for each thing. If a plan is "Plus" on one page, "Plus plan" on another and "the premium tier" on a third, the assistant may treat them as three products. Spell out an abbreviation once, then keep one name everywhere.
5. Put the condition next to the claim. "Free returns" is half a fact. "Returns are free if the item is unused and sent back within the return window" carries its own condition. Exceptions belong beside the rule they change, not on a separate page.

Before and after

Here is the paragraph from the top, rewritten. The figures in the second version are invented placeholders for this illustration, not real shop terms.

Before: "Orders usually go out quickly, and larger items may take a bit longer. Free delivery applies on bigger orders during sales."

After: "Orders ship within [N] working days. Items marked 'oversize' ship within [M] working days. Delivery is free on orders over [amount] from [start date] to [end date]."

In a real page the brackets hold your own values. What matters is the shape: a duration, a named exception, an amount and a date range. With that shape the question "Is delivery free?" gets a checkable answer: only above the stated amount, and only inside the stated dates.

Three checks for stale data

Old text gives wrong answers too, even when it was once correct. After the rewrite, go through the pages the helper reads and look for three things. First, dates: any year or month in the past that is written as if it were current needs an update or a removal. Second, facts that live on several pages, such as opening hours, prices and return windows. Make the copies match, or keep the fact on one page and link to it from the others. Third, leftovers: pages for products or offers that ended are still readable, so delete them or mark them clearly as ended.

Mistakes that undo the work

Facts placed only in images or PDFs may never reach a text reader. A line like "see above" or "as mentioned" stands in for the fact, and a helper that reads one paragraph at a time will not know what it points to. And the most common one: tweaking the helper's wording while the page itself stays vague.

Where this stops working

Good text reduces mistakes. It does not remove them. A model vendor's guide to reducing hallucinations suggests letting the model say it does not know, grounding answers in quotes from the source, and checking claims against those quotes. It also says these techniques reduce hallucinations without eliminating them. So keep an exit for the visitor, such as a link to your contact page when the helper is unsure.

Your next step is small. Pick the page that came up most in step one, rewrite its first three paragraphs using the steps above, and ask the same question again. If the answer now matches the page, do the next page. If it does not, the rewrite still left a gap, and the wrong answer shows you where.