An AI chat for a Tilda site: step-by-step guide and pitfalls

Tilda stores connect to an AI chat faster than any: the code is pasted in the site settings and the bot usually finds the catalog by itself. But those two steps have details that cost newcomers an hour. Let’s go through them in order.

What you need beforehand

• A Tilda project with published pages. The bot reads what an ordinary visitor sees, so drafts and password-protected pages are invisible to it.
• A catalog built with Tilda’s store blocks (products have their own pages).
• A sitemap. Tilda creates sitemap.xml itself unless it is turned off in the settings. Check: open your-site.com/sitemap.xml.
• Shipping, payment and returns terms in the text of your pages, not in images. The bot doesn’t read text from images.

Where the bot gets the catalog

Tilda product pages contain schema.org markup: name, price, availability and photo. The address of such a page contains /tproduct/. The bot finds those addresses in the sitemap and reads the data.

To make sure your store is fine, open any product card on its own page. If it has its own address like your-site.com/catalog/tproduct/..., all is well.

Step 1. Get the code

The code looks like one line:

<script async src="https://api.botnow.site/widget.js" data-key="your_key"></script>

You get it in the wizard on botnow.site after the bot has studied your site and you’ve checked its answers.

Step 2. Paste the code into Tilda

Option 1. For the whole site.

1. Open the project and go to “Site settings”.
2. Section “More”, the field for HTML code (inside HEAD or BODY, whichever is available on your plan).
3. Click “Edit code”, paste the line, save.
4. Publish all pages. Code from the site settings is attached to every page of the project, but changes apply only after publishing.

Option 2. For a single page. Add a T123 “HTML code” block from the “Other” section, paste the line and publish the page. This suits cases where the chat is needed only on the catalog and product pages.

Step 3. Check

Open the published site in a window where you are not logged in to Tilda. A chat button appears in the lower-right corner. In the BotNow wizard the status changes to “widget found”.

Tilda styles and Zero Block elements don’t affect the widget: it runs in an isolated shell.

What can go wrong

The chat didn’t appear. Check in order: whether the page was published after the edit, whether the code was pasted into a commented-out block, whether the browser blocks third-party scripts (an ad-blocking extension). Open the browser console: if the widget was forbidden on this domain, there will be a message.

The bot doesn’t find the products. Most often there are two causes:

1. Cards open in a pop-up without their own addresses, and they are not in the sitemap.
2. “Price on request” stands instead of a price. The bot will see the product but can’t name a price and will say it needs to be confirmed.

In both cases an XML (YML) feed or a file with the list of products helps; see custom sites.

Prices in the chat differ from the site. The bot states the price it read when it studied the site. If you changed prices later, re-read the site: scheduled catalog refresh is planned for the dashboard.

The Tilda cart and checkout. The bot doesn’t place orders or add products to the cart. It states the price, shows the card and leads to the product page, and the shopper acts from there.

What to check before launch

Ask the bot the 10 questions your shoppers ask most often and separately check prices and shipping questions. How to organise such a check is described in How to test an AI chat before launch.

Frequently asked questions

See also

• How to test an AI chat before launch: 36 questions to three stores and what we learned

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