I added search to my chatbot — and didn't let AI write the answers
People kept asking for something simpler than a conversation: a box you type into that finds the right page and gets out of the way. So the search uses AI to retrieve and deliberately not to generate — the answers on a site should be written by the person responsible for them.
Why search, when I already had a chatbot
Not every visitor wants a conversation. Some want the page, and a chatbot is a slow way to hand it to them.
The decision: retrieve, but don't generate
AI finds the passage; a human wrote it. Nothing on the page is machine-written, so nothing on the page can be confidently wrong.
What still happens behind the scenes
The retrieval side is the same engine the chatbot uses — embeddings in your own database, no third-party call per search.
How I made the matches good
What actually moved match quality, as opposed to what sounded like it would.