This guide takes you from a website address to a live AI assistant that answers visitor questions and collects leads. The steps follow the order NoForm.ai presents them, starting on the homepage and ending with the chat widget running on your site.
Step 1: Create your assistant from your website URL
The fastest way to build an assistant is to let NoForm.ai read your existing website.
Go to the NoForm.ai homepage and find the field under “Enter your website link to create your AI chatbot in just 1 minute!”.
Type your website address, for example
example.com.Click Try for free.
A progress screen appears with the heading “Creating AI Assistant for” followed by your address, and the message “We are going to scan your website and create a tailored AI Assistant in about 10 seconds.”
📝 Note: NoForm.ai reads your website and sets the assistant up for you. It picks up your company name, writes a welcome message, suggests two conversation starters, sets Email and Phone as the information to collect from visitors, and restricts the widget to the domain you entered. It also sends your website for training, so the site becomes the first entry on the Web Sources tab of the Training Center, together with the sub-pages found during the crawl.
The assistant starts with a Sales role, a Professional tone, quick replies turned on, and a default call to action of “Contact us”. You can change all of this later in the assistant settings.
If your site blocks automated access, you see the message “We’re having trouble retrieving data from the URL you provided. The website may have restricted automated data access. Try again with another URL or enter the data about your company manually.” Click Try Again to retry with a different address, or use the manual option to type your company name, description, call to action, lead attributes, and calendar link yourself.
Step 2: Test the assistant, then create your account
When the scan finishes, NoForm.ai opens a test screen headed “Let’s chat!” with the instruction “Ask assistant about your business i.e. request a quote or a demo”. Nothing is on your website at this point.
Send the assistant a few questions a real visitor would ask, such as a request for a quote or a demo.
Check that the answers match your business and that the welcome message and conversation starters read well.
Click Save progress & continue.
If you do not have an account yet, that button takes you to the sign-up page. Complete sign-up with your email address and a password, or with one of the sign-on options shown on that screen. The assistant you created is saved and attached to your new account, so you keep everything the scan produced. If you are already signed in, the button takes you straight to the dashboard.
Step 3: Configure your assistant
The dashboard menu has two groups. Performance holds Leads, Chats, and Insights. Settings holds AI assistants, Training Center, and Chat Widget, which opens to reveal Display settings and Installation.
Open AI assistants and select your assistant. Its settings are split across four tabs:
Setup contains the AI interaction rules: a free-text Prompt field where you write the assistant’s role, tone, language, and the action you want visitors to take. New assistants start with this text format.
Lead qualification controls the required lead attributes. Email and Phone are toggles, and at least one of them has to stay on for chats to qualify as leads. You can add custom lead attributes here too.
Engagement covers the welcome message and the conversation starters visitors can click, up to five of them.
Visibility controls which pages of your site the assistant appears on.
Click Save assistant when you are done, or Cancel to drop the changes.
Step 4: Review and extend the knowledge base
The Training Center is where you manage everything your assistant knows about your business. It has three tabs: Web Sources, Documents, and Q&A pair.
Open Training Center and review the pages listed on the Web Sources tab. Each row shows a status, and you can filter the list by status. Click Add source to add another page or site, then paste the link into the “Add source” dialog.
Switch to the Documents tab to add material that is not on your website, such as price lists or product sheets. The page states “You can upload PDF, DOCX, DOC, or TXT files up to 10MB.” You upload one document at a time, and two documents cannot share the same name.
Use the Q&A pair tab for questions you want answered a specific way every time.
Everything you add here feeds a technique called RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation). Your pages and documents are processed and stored. When a visitor asks a question, the system finds the relevant passages and hands them to the AI along with the question, so answers stay grounded in your own content instead of guesswork.
💡 Tip: Review your sources whenever your pricing, products, or opening hours change. An assistant that quotes an old page is the most common cause of wrong answers.
Step 5: Match the widget to your brand
Open Chat Widget and then Display settings. The Appearance card holds the visual options:
AI Assistant name, the title visitors see at the top of the chat.
Logo, where the recommended image size is 120x120 and the file has to be under 4.5 MB.
Action color and Background color, which you set with a color picker.
Shape, where you choose square, rounded square, or circle.
Chat bubble position, set to Bottom Right or Bottom Left, with “Move left / right” and “Move top / bottom” values to fine-tune the spacing.
A preview panel on the same page shows the result, and you can switch it between the Chat bubble and Embedded chat formats. Click Publish changes to save, or Discard to revert.
Step 6: Test before you go live
Test the assistant with the real content and settings before any visitor sees it.
Use the Testing mode panel on the right side of the assistant settings page. It runs the live chat against your current draft, so you can check a change before saving it. Click Start over to clear the conversation and begin again.
Use the same test chat on the right side of the Training Center page after adding sources, to confirm the assistant now answers from the new material.
Open Installation and find Share chat via URL. Copy that link with the button next to it and send it to a colleague so they can try the assistant without touching your website.
NoForm.ai stores conversations that arrive through the shared link in your chat history and counts them in your analytics, so treat them as real traffic. They are useful for seeing how a chat turns into a lead, and worth remembering when you review your numbers later.
Step 7: Install the widget on your website
Open Chat Widget and then Installation.
❗Warning: The installation code is only available with an active subscription. Until you subscribe, the page shows “Unlock your AI assistant installation code” with a Get installation code button. Billing is available from the account menu at the bottom of the dashboard menu.
In the Installation instructions panel, fill in Organization website domain. The widget only works when this value matches the site it is installed on, and you do not need to include http:// or https://, only the domain name. Click Save domain.
In the Installation code panel, pick the format you want on the Chat bubble or Embedded chat tab.
Click Copy code.
Paste the code into your website and publish the page.
The two formats behave differently, so pick the one that suits the page:
Format | What it looks like | Where to paste it |
Chat bubble | A floating button in the corner of every page that opens into a chat window | Inside the |
Embedded chat | A chat window sitting inside your page layout | At the exact spot in the page where the chat should appear |
If the domain does not match, visitors see the message “I can’t load on this domain. Please check the Installation tab in your NoForm.ai dashboard.” instead of a working chat. Open the page in a browser after publishing and send one message to confirm the assistant replies.
For platform-specific walkthroughs covering WordPress with the default, Elementor, and Divi themes, plus Squarespace, Wix, and plain HTML, see the Installation Instructions collection in this Help Center. The Installation page also links to the same guides and offers a call with the technical team.
Step 8: Work your leads
Once the widget is live, the assistant runs on your site around the clock and collects contact details inside the conversation, without a form.
A chat becomes a lead as soon as the assistant captures at least one required lead attribute, which is Email or Phone unless you changed it on the Lead qualification tab.
Open Leads to see qualified conversations, and Chats to see all of them. Selecting a row shows the transcript, the AI summary, the visitor’s location, and the attributes collected.
Tick the Contacted checkbox on a lead once someone on your team has followed up. The dashboard records who did it and when, and the Leads table shows a Contacted column.
Open Insights for visitor, chat, and lead counts over time.
Every new lead also triggers an email to the verified addresses of your organization’s members, with the lead’s details, the chat summary, the location, and a link that opens the conversation in the dashboard. These emails are on by default. To change which of your addresses receive them, open the account menu at the bottom of the dashboard menu and choose Notifications. To push lead data into a CRM, see the Integrations collection in this Help Center.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need an account before I can test the assistant?
You can test the assistant on the “Let’s chat!” screen before creating an account. Clicking Save progress & continue starts the sign-up, and NoForm.ai attaches the assistant you built to your new account.
Will my own test chats appear in Leads and Insights?
Conversations you start from the Share chat via URL link land in your chat history and count toward your analytics, so your own testing through that link shows up alongside real visitor data. The Testing mode panels inside the dashboard do not add to your visitor numbers.
Can I change the assistant after installing the widget?
You can change the assistant at any time. Edits you save in the assistant settings, the Training Center, and Display settings apply to the widget already on your site, so you do not have to touch the code again.
Benefits
One website address is enough to get a working assistant, since the scan writes the welcome message, the conversation starters, and the first knowledge sources for you.
You can chat with the assistant before creating an account, so you see the quality of the answers before you commit.
The widget only loads on the domain you authorize, which stops anyone else from running your assistant on their site.
Contact details arrive from the conversation itself, so visitors reach you without filling in a form.