Custom Chatbot

Yes. Surmado Sites is the underlying product. Chat isn't sold separately. It's one of the surfaces Scout maintains as part of operating your site.

You're right to be skeptical. Most chatbots are deflection tools. They run from a generic script or a hallucinating model, and they exist to keep visitors from talking to a human. They fail at it.

Scout's chat is the opposite. It reads the live content on your site and answers from there with citations to the source page. If the answer isn't on your site, Scout says so and offers to collect the visitor's contact information so a human can follow up. Try it on this page right now. The chat widget in the bottom-right corner is Scout answering from the site you're reading.

No. Scout uses strict RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) and embeddings over your real site content. Every answer is grounded in what your site actually says, with citations to the source page. If the answer isn't on your site, Scout says so and can collect the visitor's contact information instead of guessing.

This is the same technology powering Scout across Surmado. Try it on this page. The chat widget in the bottom-right corner is Scout answering from the site you're reading right now.

Chat can answer in the visitor's language when that language is enabled for the site. A Spanish visitor asks in Spanish and gets Spanish; a Japanese visitor gets keigo.

Yes. When a visitor asks something the site doesn't answer (custom pricing, scheduling, "do you serve my zip code?"), Scout can collect the visitor's contact information for follow-up.

Chat appears as a small widget on your site, styled to match your brand. Scout handles setup as part of Surmado Sites.

Chat conversations are handled under Surmado's Privacy Policy. They are not sold or used to train third-party models.

Intercom, Drift, and similar platforms are chat tools that the business operates: the business owner builds and maintains the knowledge base, writes the bot responses, and watches the chat tool day to day. An OpenAI Assistant requires the business to assemble training data, configure tools, and manage the assistant directly. Surmado's chat is a surface of Surmado Sites, the same managed web presence service that hosts and maintains the website. Scout answers from the live site content that Scout already maintains. There is no separate chatbot for the business owner to configure, train, or watch. Chat alignment with the site is continuous because the site and the chat share the same managed source.

Surmado's architecture layers deterministic code, machine learning, and LLM orchestration rather than relying on a single model. The chat retrieval layer (which content to surface for which question) uses embeddings, semantic similarity, and vector retrieval over the indexed site content. The response synthesis layer uses LLM orchestration for natural language generation, given clean and validated retrieval results. Surmado can route tasks across different models based on capability fit and language. Patent pending.

Surmado does not fine-tune a separate model on each customer website. Scout indexes, chunks, embeds, retrieves, and cites the site content, then uses LLM orchestration to answer from the retrieved source material. This is a retrieval-augmented architecture, not model fine-tuning. The phrase "trained on your site" describes the practical outcome: chat answers come from your site, not from a generic model's training data.

Only with constraints. Scout answers from the indexed site content. Customers can extend what the chat knows by adding pages to the site (which Scout will index and surface in chat the next time the site is rebuilt) or by adding structured business fields like hours, locations, service areas, and policies through Scout. Scout does not invent business facts from outside the documented source.

Yes. Chat can answer in the languages enabled for the site. When the visitor's language matches one Surmado Sites maintains, Scout answers in the same language, using the per-language register rules (informal Spanish, formal German, keigo Japanese) that govern the translated pages.

Knowledge-base chatbots require the business owner to keep two systems in sync: the website and the chatbot's knowledge base. When the website changes, the knowledge base falls behind unless someone updates it. Surmado's chat reads the live site content that Scout maintains, so the chat stays aligned with the site as part of the same managed workflow. There is one source of truth and one party (Scout) responsible for keeping it current.

$100 per month as an add-on to Surmado Sites. Enabling chat is one Job.