AI Search — An Ask Box That Answers From Your Own Pages

AI Search is a search-shaped box that answers from what you have taught the assistant, sitting
in a placeholder on your page. Somebody types a question where they would have typed keywords, and gets an answer —
with product or article rows underneath when the catalogue has something to show.

It is the same assistant as the chat bubble, wearing a different face: the same knowledge, the same
instructions, the same guardrails, the same billing. What it knows and how it behaves is set once under AI Chat
→ Settings; see AI Chat agent.

It is not a search engine, and the box says so. The line under it reads “Answers from this
site, not a web search” by default. That is deliberate: an answer box sets an expectation it can actually
meet, where a box promising ranked results would lose to any real search engine on the first typo.

Chat, or ask box?

	AI Search (ask box)	AI Chat (bubble)
Where it sits	In the page, where you place it	A corner of the screen, or a placeholder
Greeting	None — it answers what was asked	Greeting and suggested questions
Hands over to a person	Off by default	On by default
Catalogue rows	Yes	Yes
Best on	Pages people search from — a catalogue, a help section, a long article	Anywhere you want a conversation

An ask box belongs on the pages people search from, rather than on every page you have.

Adding one

Create a campaign from Create new → AI Search & Chat, then on the Content
step add an AI Search action. You can add both faces to one campaign — a box on the page and a
bubble in the corner.

The action has two steps: Set Up This Search Box and Set Display Rules &
Placement. There is also an AI Search element in the
Canvas Builder, with the same settings under
slightly different labels, for dropping a box inside a design you are already building.

Give it somewhere to appear

On the placement step, choose either an inline placeholder or a popup position.
Either works: a placeholder gives the box your page’s own width; a popup gives it a frame of its own.

Until you choose one, the action has nowhere to render — and nothing on the page will tell you why.
Personyze blocks the publish rather than letting you find out later: “‘{name}’ has nowhere to
appear — choose where it should show before this goes live, or visitors will see nothing.” The same check
applies to staging.

What the box says

Inside the box — the grey text before anybody types. “This is the whole invitation
— a box nobody understands is a box nobody uses.” Default: Ask about anything on this site.
Button — default Ask.
Note underneath — where you set the expectation: it answers a question, it does not rank
results. Leave it empty and the built-in line is used.
Colour — six swatches or your own. Leave it alone to follow the assistant.

All three wording fields accept visitor variables, so Ask about your order, ${user->first_name}
resolves per visitor with a fallback.

Once the box has been used, its follow-up field says Ask another question and the button keeps the
box’s own word — it stops borrowing the chat’s “Type your message” and “Send”,
which made a search box read like a conversation.

What it answers from

Answer from is the whole knowledge base, or only sources carrying one tag —
which is most of the reason this is its own action. A box beside one product line reads a different shelf from the one on
your support pages. Tags are applied to sources on the Knowledge section of Settings.

Pick a tag and you choose what happens when that tag has no answer:

Answer from the whole knowledge base.
Answer from the whole knowledge base, and say it is outside what this box covers.
Say it cannot help with that here.

Search which catalogue

Where your account imports more than one feed, this points the placement at one of them: a shop with a
feed per country can have its Spanish pages search Spanish titles and never offer a product named in another language.
Items that came from no feed at all are always included — they are yours rather than any storefront’s.

The control only appears when there is more than one feed to choose between. With one feed, that feed is the
catalogue.

The instant rows are not feed-scoped. The moment somebody presses Enter, Personyze paints catalogue
rows straight away while the written answer is still coming. Those first rows ignore this setting; the assistant’s
own search honours it and replaces them. On a Spanish page pointed at a Spanish feed, the first rows can briefly be from
another feed.

Its own rules

Can it hand over to a person? — off by default:
“A search box that quietly turns into a support queue is not what the page put there.” With it off
the assistant keeps answering and says plainly that this box cannot reach a person — and asking for a human in
words will not open a case either. If somebody really needs a person, give them a chat placement.
Extra instructions — added after the assistant’s own, for these pages only.
It must never — added to the assistant’s hard rules, one per line.

A placement can be stricter than the account, never looser. Nothing here can loosen a rule set on the
Settings screens, and a catalogue choice can only narrow what the account already imports.

If you choose “Say it cannot help with that here” while handover is off, the
assistant may still offer to pass the visitor to somebody — an offer this box cannot honour. Pair that option with
handover on, or use one of the two wider options.

Living alongside the chat

An ask box never hides a corner chat, and never stands down for one: the rule that keeps two
conversation windows off one page does not count a box, because a box is a pill in the page rather than a window.
Two ask boxes in two different placeholders are fine too.

An existing conversation wins. A visitor who already spoke to the corner chat in this tab and then
asks in the box carries the chat’s scope, handover and instructions — not the box’s. The
conversation binds to the first placement it saw, and nothing says so on screen.

The preview

The designer runs the real box beside your settings, so you can see the wording as a visitor would. Typing in it is
answered locally — the preview never spends your AI credit, and never creates a conversation or a
transcript.

It redraws for the four things it can show: the placeholder, the button, the note and the colour. Changing the
knowledge tag, the feed, handover or the instruction boxes will not appear to do anything there — those are not
painted. If the preview says the script could not be loaded from your tracker host, that is usually a locked-down
network, not a broken action.

When it does nothing at all

The assistant is switched off on the account — the box draws nothing, with no error. That is
deliberate: the honest reading of “switched off” is that there is no assistant here.
No placement chosen — see above.
The conversation allowance is spent — the box does not render, though a visitor already
mid-conversation is allowed to finish.
Products are switched off under Settings → Data, in which case no feed choice can produce a
single row and the box is knowledge-only.
A tag or feed that no longer exists — the designer flags both in amber, but only when you open
it. A missing tag falls through to your “no answer” setting; a missing feed leaves the placement searching
only your un-fed items.

A visitor sees three catalogue rows at most, and a rate limit and an empty catalogue look identical
from their side — the written answer arrives with no rows under it.

AI Chat agent — the assistant itself: knowledge, behaviour, data, handover, people and billing.
Placeholders — where the box goes.
Product / content feeds — what it searches.