Why your AI chatbot is a tracker
Most WordPress AI chat plugins quietly send your page content and every visitor question to a chain of third parties — in the case that started this post, eleven of them, found by opening the network tab on a small cosmetics brand's site. This is how that architecture leaks, why we rebuilt ours from scratch, and what a privacy-first chatbot looks like instead.
The architecture of the leak
Where the data actually goes when a hosted chat widget answers a question, and why the number of parties involved surprises even the developer who installed it.
Why we started over
Why the leak cannot be patched out of a hosted widget, and what has to change at the architectural level rather than in a privacy policy.
What we built instead
RAG Chat keeps the embeddings in your own WordPress database. Your content is not used to train anyone's model, and your visitors' questions are not passed on.
The Loop
Every question your content failed to answer is already the title of the page you should write next.
What to do about it
How to check what your own chat plugin is sending, and what to look for before installing one.