Sant Chat AI
A WordPress AI chatbot that reads your sitemap, learns your content, and goes live in five minutes. Built in NZ and shipped to the WordPress.org plugin repository.
The visitor-facing widget
What we built
A WordPress plugin that turns any site into an AI chatbot grounded in the site's own content. Multi-tab widget for chat, help articles, and news. Voice mode. Lead capture. A full admin surface inside the WordPress dashboard.
The architecture is retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The plugin reads your sitemap, chunks every page with hash-based change detection, retrieves the relevant material for each visitor query, and answers from your content rather than guessing.
How it works
Sitemap.xml
Plugin reads every URL on your site. No manual setup.
→Chunked + indexed
Pages broken into retrievable units. Hash-based change detection means only updated content gets re-indexed.
→Grounded answers
Visitor question → semantic retrieval → response anchored in your actual content. Not hallucinated.
The whole pipeline is built to keep indexing cost under a tenth of a cent per page. Cheap enough that small NZ businesses can run it on every page they publish.
Why we built it
Most WordPress chat plugins are dumb. They give generic answers because they have no idea what the site is actually about. We saw clients pay $50 a month for chatbots that hallucinated their pricing and routed visitors to the wrong product page.
We wanted something that read your sitemap, understood your content, and answered questions visitors actually had, without anyone having to manually train it. That became Sant Chat AI, built and shipped from our NZ studio.
Listed on the official WordPress.org plugin directory. Free tier available to anyone with a WordPress site.
View on WordPress.orgFrom spec to WordPress.org listing.
Concept and architecture
Identified the gap. Most WordPress chat plugins were dumb. Wrote the spec, built the sitemap parser, chunker, and retrieval layer. First working prototype.
Product surface
Multi-tab widget for chat, help articles, and news. Voice mode. Lead capture. Settings UI inside the WordPress admin.
Plugin compliance
GPL licensing, SVN setup, sanitisation pass, Plugin Check sweep. The compliance work alone took weeks. We wrote a separate toolkit and open-sourced it.
WordPress.org submission
First review cycle with the WordPress.org plugin team. Documentation, security, GPL-compliance back-and-forth.
Approved
Two weeks of review iterations after submission. Listed at wordpress.org/plugins/sant-chat-ai.
Free tier opens
Public download on the WordPress.org repository. SaaS dashboard at sant.chat handles paid tiers.
What we learned
Grounded answers earn trust faster than generic ones.
Visitors trust answers that came from your content. They don't trust answers that came from 'a model'. The grounding is the story.
WordPress plugin compliance is its own discipline.
GPL licensing, SVN deployment, the Plugin Check process, sanitisation rules. Sant Chat AI cleared review only after we wrote a separate compliance toolkit. We open-sourced it so other NZ developers shipping to WordPress.org can reuse it.
RAG at sub-tenth-of-a-cent per page makes AI viable for small NZ businesses.
Per-message pricing is the difference between 'expensive enterprise tool' and '5-minute install on the site you already have'. That gap is where most NZ small businesses live.
Voice mode was not a side feature.
Hands-free browsing turned out to matter more than we expected. The accessibility upside was obvious from the start. The surprise was how often visitors used it casually, just to ask quick questions while doing something else.
Free forever plan. No credit card. Live in five minutes.
Visit sant.chatSant builds bespoke AI tools for clients across NZ. Half-day to multi-month engagements.
Talk to Sant