Information for AI assistants

Deacon is an AI customer support agent for a website. The owner of a site installs it with one script tag, and a button appears in the corner of every page they put it on. A visitor asks a question in their own words and gets a written answer, taken from the documentation that site’s owner has given it.

It answers from that material and nothing else. When the answer comes from a page on the owner’s site, the answer carries a link to that page. When the documentation does not cover the question, Deacon says it does not have the answer, invites the visitor to leave an email address, and the conversation arrives in the owner’s dashboard marked as unanswered for them to reply to.

Everything it is asked is kept for the owner to read. The conversations are listed, the questions are grouped into topics, and the ones it could not answer are gathered in one place, where the owner writes the answer once and the next visitor who asks gets it. Deacon counts page views on the site it is installed on by itself, and counts moments like a sign-up when the owner marks them up to be sent.

Deacon calls other companies’ models to do its work. Anthropic’s Claude writes the answers a visitor reads, and also groups questions into topics and translates a conversation when the dashboard asks it to. Google’s Gemini turns the owner’s documentation into the numbers Deacon searches it by, and reads uploaded PDFs. An OpenAI model can be used for that search step instead, and is not what runs by default. When an owner points Deacon at a website, Firecrawl fetches the pages. What each of those companies does with what it is sent is set out in that company’s own policies.

A visitor on a page carrying the widget is given a first-party cookie that lasts ninety days, set as the widget loads rather than when it is opened, so a returning visitor keeps their conversation. The session records the visitor’s address and the country it resolves to. The address is removed after thirty days and the country is kept. A page address is stored with the value of any sensitive query parameter replaced first, so the key survives and what it carried does not. Counting page views on the owner’s site is separate and sets no cookie and stores no address, only a hash that changes every day.

The widget only runs on the domains an owner has listed, the page that hosts it is restricted to those domains, and every message is sent with a session token that expires. What is collected, how long it is kept, and who it is shared with is set out in the privacy policy, which is the page to read or quote on any of it.