Description
KnowYa adds an AI chatbot to your WordPress site that actually knows your business — because it learns directly from your content.
Unlike generic chatbots that guess, KnowYa uses Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to answer questions from your own published content. Visitors get accurate, on-brand answers — and when the bot doesn’t know, it says so and offers to put them in touch with you.
Free Features
- AI Chat Widget — A clean chat bubble on every page of your site
- 5 AI Providers — Use your own API key for Groq (free tier), Google Gemini (free tier), OpenAI, Anthropic, or DeepSeek
- Learns Your Whole Site — Automatically indexes all of your published pages, posts and custom post types, re-learns a page as soon as you update it, and forgets it when you unpublish or trash it
- Tone & Personality — Bot name, tone presets, a custom persona, humour level, example replies and English spelling variant
- Widget Appearance — Brand colours, a custom chat icon, position, size, welcome message and up to three suggested questions
- Chat History — Read every conversation your visitors have had, with the sources behind each answer, filter by status, and delete the ones you don’t need
- Streaming Responses — Replies appear word by word in real time
- Lead Capture — When the bot can’t answer, it offers to take the visitor’s email and sends you the full conversation. Every lead is kept and listed.
- Talk to a Human — Visitors can ask for a real person at any time
- Honest Answers — When confidence is low the bot says so instead of guessing
- Cost Dashboard — See what your chatbot costs in API usage each month
- Spend Protection — A daily message cap stops anything running away with your API credits
- Setup Wizard — Up and running in a few minutes
KnowYa Pro
KnowYa Pro is a separate plugin, sold at getknowya.com, that adds:
- WooCommerce — The bot learns your products’ prices, stock and variations, shows product cards in replies, and looks up order status for customers
- Document Training — Upload PDFs, Word documents, text and CSV files to teach the bot about manuals, FAQs, price lists and more
- Lead CSV Export and Webhooks — Export your leads, or push each new one straight into any CRM via Zapier, Make, or your own endpoint
- Answer Gap Reports — See the questions your content doesn’t answer, then draft an FAQ page from them in one click
- Tone Generator — Write a tone profile from your existing content in one click
- Analytics — Track conversations, popular questions and engagement
Why KnowYa?
- It captures leads — unanswered questions become contacts in your inbox, not lost visitors
- No vendor lock-in — switch AI providers any time without losing your knowledge base
- Your own API key — you control the cost, with no per-message markup, and the dashboard shows exactly what you’re spending
- Grounded in your content — answers stay tied to what you’ve published, and the bot admits when it doesn’t know
- Works with any theme — including Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder, Bricks and Kadence
Supported AI Providers
Groq — Recommended. A generous free tier with no credit card, and very fast responses.
Google Gemini — Free tier available through Google AI Studio.
OpenAI — Requires a paid API key.
Anthropic (Claude) — Requires a paid API key.
DeepSeek — Low cost; new accounts usually receive free credits.
External Services
This plugin relies on third-party services. Nothing is sent to any of them until you choose an AI provider and enter your own API key.
AI providers (you choose which, and supply your own key)
When a visitor sends a chat message, the plugin sends that message, the recent conversation, and relevant excerpts of your indexed site content to the AI provider you configured, so it can write a reply. When your content is indexed, excerpts of it are sent to Google Gemini or OpenAI (whichever you configure for embeddings) to build the search index. No data is sent to a provider you have not configured.
- Groq — Terms of Use | Privacy Policy
- Google Gemini — Terms of Service | Privacy Policy
- OpenAI — Terms of Use | Privacy Policy
- Anthropic — Terms | Privacy Policy
- DeepSeek — Terms of Use | Privacy Policy
Freemius (licensing and updates)
Licence activation, updates and billing are handled by Freemius. If you opt in when activating the plugin, basic information about your site and WordPress environment is shared with Freemius. Opting in is optional, and the plugin works fully without it. Terms | Privacy Policy
Privacy
Conversations, leads and your knowledge base are stored in your own WordPress database, and visitor IP addresses are hashed before they are stored.
Chat conversations are deleted automatically after 90 days. You can change the period, or keep conversations forever, under KnowYa Leads. Leads are kept until you delete them.
WordPress’s Export Personal Data and Erase Personal Data tools find a person’s KnowYa data by email address: the leads they left, the conversations those leads came from, and every conversation they had while logged in to your site. Anonymous conversations where no email was given cannot be linked to a person, so these tools cannot find them.
Because chat messages are sent to the AI provider you choose, please mention that provider in your site’s privacy policy.
Screenshots
Installation
- In your WordPress admin go to Plugins Add New Plugin
- Search for “KnowYa”, then click Install Now and Activate
- Click KnowYa in the admin menu to start the Setup Wizard
- Choose an AI provider and paste in your API key — the chatbot starts learning your site straight away
Getting a free Groq API key (recommended)
- Visit console.groq.com/keys
- Sign up (no credit card required)
- Click Create API Key
- Paste the key into KnowYa AI Provider Groq
Getting a free Gemini API key
- Visit aistudio.google.com/apikey
- Sign in with your Google account
- Click Create API key
- Paste it into KnowYa AI Provider Google Gemini
Use a key from Google AI Studio. Keys created in Google Cloud Console have no free-tier quota.
FAQ
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Do I need to pay for anything to get started?
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No. The plugin is free, and both Groq and Google Gemini offer free API tiers with no credit card required.
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Will the chatbot make things up?
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KnowYa is built to avoid it. Answers are grounded in your indexed content, and when the bot can’t find a confident answer it says so — and can offer to collect the visitor’s email instead of guessing. No AI system can promise zero mistakes, so it’s worth reviewing some conversations after launch.
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How much of my site does it learn?
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All of your published pages, posts and any public custom post types you choose. Password-protected content is never included. KnowYa Pro adds WooCommerce product details (prices, stock and variations) and uploaded documents.
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Does it work with WooCommerce?
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Yes. The free plugin can learn your product pages like any other post type (tick Products under KnowYa Training). KnowYa Pro adds prices, stock and variations, product cards in replies, and order-status lookups.
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Will it slow down my website?
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No. The widget script loads in the footer, and indexing runs in the background through WP-Cron, never during a page load.
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Can I switch AI providers later?
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Yes, at any time. Go to KnowYa AI Provider, choose a new provider, enter its API key and save. Your knowledge base is kept.
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What happens to my visitors’ data?
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Conversations and leads are stored in your own WordPress database and IP addresses are hashed. Chats are deleted automatically after 90 days, or after the period you set under KnowYa Leads. Leads are kept until you delete them, and WordPress’s personal data export and erasure tools cover them. See Privacy above. Chat messages are sent to the AI provider you choose so it can reply — see External Services above.
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Where can I get support?
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Please post in the plugin’s support forum here on WordPress.org.
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Where do I manage my Pro licence?
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From the KnowYa Account page in your WordPress admin, or through the customer portal linked in your purchase email.
Reviews
Contributors & Developers
“KnowYa” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
Translate “KnowYa” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
1.2.10
- Fixed: suggested questions no longer reappear above a conversation the visitor has already started when the chat reopens on another page. They come back with New chat
1.2.9
- Improved: with WordPress debugging on, KnowYa now writes only warnings and errors to the debug log. Routine progress messages need KNOWYA_DEBUG set to true in wp-config.php
1.2.8
- New: Chat History is now part of the free plugin
- Fixed: activation on older MySQL and MariaDB versions that WordPress supports. Tables no longer use JSON columns or automatic timestamp defaults, the search index is created only where the database supports it (with a fallback search where it does not), and a failed table setup now shows an explanation instead of being recorded as installed
- Improved: Chat History has proper styling
1.2.7
- Code quality: resolves the Plugin Check warnings about database queries, variable prefixes and input handling. No change in behaviour
1.2.6
- Fixed: suggested questions did not load in the chat widget on sites using WordPress’s default (“plain”) permalinks
- Improved: no promotional notices outside KnowYa’s own pages. The Freemius SDK’s trial and affiliate notices are switched off
- Improved: the dashboard no longer shows a Documents count in the free plugin, where documents cannot be uploaded
1.2.5
- Fixed: reactivating the plugin could print database warnings, because the table definitions did not follow the format WordPress’s dbDelta() expects
- Improved: the setup reminder shows only to administrators, on the Plugins screen and KnowYa’s own page
- Improved: the “widget hidden” diagnostic comment in the page source is shown only to administrators
1.2.4
- New: Tone & Personality and Widget Appearance settings are now part of the free plugin
- New: custom post types can be indexed in the free plugin
- Security: password-protected pages and posts are no longer added to the knowledge base, so the chatbot cannot reveal their content. Any already indexed are removed when they are next saved, or by the daily clean-up
- Fixed: on new installs the background indexing and embedding jobs were never scheduled, so answers fell back to keyword search. Existing sites are repaired automatically
- Improved: admin scripts and styles are all loaded through WordPress’s enqueue functions
1.2.3
- Improved: the free version is about 3 MB smaller. The PDF and Word libraries that only Pro’s document uploads use are no longer included in it
1.2.2
- New: choose how long chat conversations are kept (default 90 days, or forever) under KnowYa Leads
- New: WordPress’s personal data export and erasure tools now cover leads, and the conversations they came from, by email address
- Improved: pages and posts are re-learned as soon as you update them, and removed from the knowledge base as soon as they are unpublished, trashed or deleted
- Fixed: unchanged pages were re-sent to your embedding provider on every background sweep, using API credits for nothing
- Fixed: the Delete buttons in Chat History did nothing (Pro)
- Fixed: only three suggested questions are ever shown, so the Appearance tab now offers three fields instead of eight (Pro)
- Fixed: the suggested privacy policy text no longer says chats are deleted after 0 days when they are kept forever, and now mentions lead details
- Fixed: upgrade prompts and the setup wizard now describe features that exist
1.2.1
- Fixed: “Generate from my content” (tone) failing on Groq GPT-OSS models
- When every AI provider fails, the error now shows what each provider reported
- Admin header shows the current KnowYa icon
1.2.0
- Free plan now lists every lead you capture — none are held back
- Free plan now learns all of your published pages and posts, with no page limit
- Fixed: large sites and stores now have all of their content indexed, not only the 500 most recently changed items
- Fixed: streamed replies no longer occasionally drop words, and a failed AI request now shows an error instead of an empty reply
- Fixed: if the AI provider fails part-way through a reply, the error is now reported instead of the reply silently stopping short
- Security: uploaded documents are stored under unguessable file names
- Security: exported lead spreadsheets are protected against formula injection
- Security: debug logging only runs when WordPress debugging is enabled
- Security: Google Gemini API keys are no longer included in request URLs
- Improved: support for OpenAI’s reasoning models (the o-series and GPT-5)
- Improved: model lists stay current as AI providers retire and release models
- Improved: product prices are indexed as readable amounts
- Improved: compatibility with PHP 8.4
1.1.0
- New: Lead capture — the bot offers to take a visitor’s email when it can’t answer, and emails you the details with the full transcript
- New: “Talk to a human” — visitors can request a real person at any time
- New: Confidence-aware answers — when the knowledge base has no good match, the bot says so instead of guessing
- New: Answer Gap report and one-click FAQ page drafts (Pro)
- New: API usage and estimated cost dashboard
- New: Sitewide daily message cap to protect your API spend
- New: WooCommerce order status lookup and product cards in chat replies (Pro)
- New: Generate a tone-of-voice profile from your existing content (Pro)
- New: Lead CSV export and webhook delivery to any CRM (Pro)
1.0.0
- Initial release