How to add an AI chatbot to a Ghost site

Ghost is built for publishing, not for support, so reader questions about subscriptions, sponsorships or past articles usually land in your inbox. A chatbot can answer the repeat ones from your own posts and pages. Here’s how to add Feedbot (we make it) to Ghost.

What you need

• A Feedbot bot id from Dashboard → Bot → Install. The Free plan is enough to start.
• Owner or Administrator access to Ghost Admin.
• Any Ghost(Pro) plan or a self-hosted Ghost install. Code injection is available on both.

Add the chatbot to every page

1. Sign in to Ghost Admin (yoursite.com/ghost).

2. Click the Settings gear in the bottom-left corner.

3. In the Advanced section, find Code injection and click Open.

4. Paste this into Site footer:

   <script src="https://w.feedbotai.com/v1/feedbot.js" data-bot-id="YOUR_BOT_ID" async></script>

5. Click Save and open your site in a new tab. The chat button appears in the bottom-right corner.

Ghost places Site footer code just before the closing </body> tag on every page, which is where scripts belong. Ghost’s own guide to code injection covers the same screen.

If Portal’s Account or Subscribe button also sits in the bottom-right corner, move the chat to the left so they don’t overlap: add data-position="bottom-left" to the script tag, or change the position in the Feedbot dashboard.

Show it on some pages only

<script>
  // Skip the chat on the homepage and on /tag/ archives.
  if (location.pathname !== "/" && !location.pathname.startsWith("/tag/")) {
    var s = document.createElement("script");
    s.src = "https://w.feedbotai.com/v1/feedbot.js";
    s.async = true;
    s.dataset.botId = "YOUR_BOT_ID";
    document.body.appendChild(s);
  }
</script>

Pass member details (optional)

Code injection doesn’t process Handlebars, so it can’t read who is signed in. Your theme can. Ghost themes expose an @member object with email, name, uuid and paid. Add this to default.hbs, before {{ghost_foot}}:

{{#if @member}}
<script>
  window.Feedbot = window.Feedbot || function () { (Feedbot.q = Feedbot.q || []).push(arguments) };
  Feedbot("identify", {
    email: "{{@member.email}}",
    name: "{{@member.name}}",
    metadata: { paid: {{#if @member.paid}}true{{else}}false{{/if}} }
  });
</script>
{{/if}}

Two caveats. First, editing default.hbs means uploading a custom or modified theme, which on Ghost(Pro) needs a plan that allows custom themes (pricing). Second, Ghost has no place to compute the server-side hash Feedbot uses for verification, so these members stay unverified: the bot sees their name, email and paid status, but they don’t get chat history across devices. That’s enough for “I’m a paid member and can’t log in” conversations. See Identify users.

Troubleshooting

Train it on your posts

From Starter, add your site in Bot → Knowledge as a website source, or use https://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml to import the pages Ghost lists there. Click Refresh website after you publish new posts; sites aren’t re-crawled automatically. Put membership prices and support contacts in the business profile so the bot always knows them. Details: knowledge base.

When a reader asks for a person, the bot hands the conversation to you in Telegram, Slack, Discord or email (handoff), and readers who leave an email show up as leads.

Next steps

• Install docs for color, language and inline mode.
• Prefer managing scripts in one place? Use Google Tag Manager.