The chatbot will not answer

What it is

"The chatbot will not answer" covers several completely different faults that look identical from the outside. The fastest way through is to read exactly what the visitor sees, because each cause produces a distinct message.

What the visitor sees	What it means
"The assistant is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later."	The account is out of message credits
"This assistant isn't ready to answer questions yet. Please check back soon."	Never finished training
"I don't have information about this topic in my knowledge base."	Trained, but nothing matched the question
"I apologize, but I encountered an error. Please try again." — or your own fallback message	Something failed during the reply
A page that will not load at all	Paused chatbot or wrong link
A chat bubble that never appears	The widget is being refused

Copy the message before you start changing settings. Chasing the wrong cause is the main reason this takes an afternoon instead of five minutes.

Where to find it

Dashboard → Chatbots → your chatbot → Playground for status, Knowledge for training, Settings → Billing for credits, and Integrations → Web for the widget.

Steps

1. Reproduce it as a visitor. Open the hosted page or your live site in a private window. The owner's test chat behaves differently and will mislead you.
2. Copy the message you actually get, word for word, and match it in the table above.
3. Check the chatbot is Active on its Playground tab. A paused chatbot's hosted page returns a not-found and its widget is refused.
4. Check credits on Settings → Billing as the owner. This is the single most common cause of a whole account going quiet at once.
5. Check training on the chatbot's Knowledge page. Every source needs to have finished, not just been added.
6. Try the owner's test chat. If it answers there and not on your site, the chatbot is fine and the problem is the surface — the widget or the link.
7. Read a failed conversation under Conversations. A refusal is very different from an outage, and the transcript tells you which you have.

Cause by cause

Out of message credits

Answering stops immediately when the credit meter hits zero. There is no grace period and no email.

The signature is that everything goes quiet at the same moment — the hosted page, the widget, any connected messaging app, and your own test chat. Credits belong to the whole account, so a fault that affects only one chatbot is never this.

Fix: open Settings → Billing as the owner and read the meter. Buy a pack or upgrade — see We are out of credits and How message credits work. If credits look healthy and one specific chatbot is silent, carry on down this list: status, training, and the link or embed you are testing are the causes that apply to a single chatbot.

Never finished training

A chatbot that has never completed a training run cannot answer from your content. Visitors get the "not ready yet" message; as the owner in test chat, you get setup guidance instead — the two audiences are deliberately shown different things so internal advice never leaks to a customer.

Fix: open Knowledge, add at least one source, and wait for training to complete. If a source is stuck, see Knowledge is stuck processing.

Trained, but the answer is "I don't have information about this"

Not a fault. The chatbot searched and found nothing relevant.

Fix: ask the question using the words your content actually uses. If it still misses, the content is missing or too thin — add a plain text note stating the fact directly. See Add text knowledge.

Paused, or the owner's account is being closed

A paused chatbot is unreachable everywhere: not-found on the hosted page, refused for the widget.

Separately, if the account owner has scheduled their account for deletion, every chatbot they own goes dark for the duration. Signing back in cancels that.

Fix: set the chatbot to Active on the Playground tab — see Activate or pause a chatbot and The hosted page is 404.

The widget specifically

The hosted link works, the website bubble does not. That is not an answering problem at all.

Fix: see The widget is blocked.

Something failed mid-reply

An occasional error message is the chatbot's fallback after a failed turn. If it is happening constantly rather than occasionally, it is worth reporting.

Fix: retry a couple of times. If it is persistent, gather the details listed at the end of this article.

A messaging app specifically

On a connected messaging app, failures produce canned replies rather than errors: "I'm temporarily unavailable. Please try again later." when the account is out of credits, and "I can only read text messages for now. Please type your question." if someone sent a photo or a sticker.

Fix: check credits first, then that the channel is genuinely connected and available on your plan — see Messaging channels availability.

Limits and plan notes

The free tier has no Call actions, so a free chatbot can answer from its knowledge but cannot look anything up, book anything, or hand off to a person. If your chatbot is silent specifically when asked to do something, that is the cause — see Plans and what you get.

The free tier has no integrations either. The public link works; the embedded widget and messaging apps do not.

Credits are shared by the whole account. Every chatbot draws from one balance, so an empty meter silences all of them and a single silent chatbot is never a credit problem.

Test chat is not proof. It skips the widget, the allowed-domains check, and the hosted-page route entirely. It also spends credits like any other conversation.

If nothing here works

Write to support with:

• the chatbot name and the account owner's email,
• the exact message the visitor sees, copied not paraphrased,
• the surface — hosted page, website widget, or a named messaging app,
• the URL where it happens,
• the time of a failed attempt, with your timezone,
• confirmation that the chatbot is Active, that training completed, and that credits are not zero.

See Contact Support. Do not include API keys or customer data.

Common problems

Test chat works, the website does not.

The model is fine; the embed is being refused. Go to The widget is blocked.

It worked yesterday and stopped overnight.

Credits or a renewal. Check the meter first, then the subscription status on Billing.

One chatbot is silent and the others are fine.

That chatbot is paused, has never finished training, or the link and embed you are testing point somewhere else. Check it individually — an account-wide cause such as credits would silence all of them.

Does a thumbs-down stop the chatbot answering?

No. Feedback records quality and nothing else. Only credits, pausing, and unfinished training affect whether an answer happens at all.

The hosted page returns a not-found.

That is a different article — see The hosted page is 404.