Every modern AI chatbot has a large language model doing the writing. When a visitor types “Do you work weekends?”, the LLM reads that question, works out what is being asked, and composes a reply one small piece of text at a time. It produces the most likely continuation based on patterns it learned during training.
How a Large Language Model Works
An LLM is a neural network, usually built on the transformer architecture, trained on an enormous collection of books, websites, and other public text. Training adjusts billions of internal settings, called parameters, until the model gets good at guessing which token (a word or word fragment) comes next. That scale is what makes it “large,” and it is also why one model can summarize, translate, classify, and hold a conversation without separate programming for each job.
Two limits matter for anyone putting one on a website. The model’s knowledge stops at its training cutoff, so it knows nothing about your opening hours, prices, or service area. It can also only consider a fixed amount of text at once, which caps how much of your site it can read in a single reply.
Why an LLM Alone Is Not Enough for a Business Website
Ask a general-purpose LLM about your plumbing company and it will either admit it has no idea or, worse, guess. That is why business chatbots pair the model with your own content. The chatbot finds the relevant passages from your pages and hands them to the LLM with the question, so the answer comes from your facts instead of the model’s memory. Our guide on how chatbots work walks through that pipeline.
- Without your content: the model answers from general knowledge and may invent details that sound plausible.
- With your content: the model rewrites what your pages actually say in plain, conversational language.
- With clear limits: when your pages do not cover a question, a well-configured bot says so and offers a way to reach you.
Choosing the LLM Behind Your Chatbot
Among the AI Chatbot features is a settings screen where you set the AI endpoint, model, and API key yourself, so you decide which LLM writes the replies while your selected WordPress pages supply the facts. If you are still deciding whether this kind of tool fits your site, start with what is a WordPress chatbot.