AI Act Art. 50(1)
AI chat widget with no disclosure
What this failure is
Article 50 of the EU AI Act says that providers of AI systems designed to interact with people must make sure users know they are dealing with an AI, unless it is already obvious in context. In practice, if your site has a chat widget powered by an AI model — a support chatbot backed by a large language model, an AI shopping assistant, or a virtual concierge — you need to tell the visitor before they start typing. A bland label saying "Chat" or "Assistant" is not enough because it does not distinguish AI from a human agent. The disclosure needs to make clear that the responses come from an AI system, at the first point of interaction. This scanner detects widgets from common vendors and looks for language such as "AI chatbot", "AI-powered assistant" or "you are chatting with an AI" in the page markup.
Reference: AI Act Art. 50(1) — the authoritative spec.
Who it affects
- All users: Users share personal information (order numbers, health questions, payment details) they might not share with a machine; informed consent requires the disclosure.
- Users with cognitive disabilities: Some users struggle to distinguish AI from human writing style; explicit disclosure prevents them mistakenly believing they have escalated to a human.
- Screen reader users: A visual badge saying "AI" does no good if it is not exposed to the accessibility tree; the disclosure needs to be in text or in an alt/aria-label the screen reader can announce.
How to fix it
Concrete steps for the four platforms most small e-commerce sites run on. If you use a different stack, the underlying HTML change is the same.
Shopify
If your chat is Shopify Inbox or a plain human-only widget, no disclosure is needed. If you have added an AI shopping assistant (Rep AI, Zowie, Gorgias Automate, Tidio's Lyro) you must disclose it. In the app's dashboard, look for a Welcome message, Greeting or Prompt setting and change the opening text to something like "Hi, I'm an AI shopping assistant. Ask me anything and I'll do my best to help. For a human agent, type 'human'." That message must render in the page before the user starts chatting, not after they send the first message.
WooCommerce
For AI chat plugins (Tidio Lyro, Chatbase, Botpress, HubSpot with an AI add-on), open the plugin's admin dashboard and edit the welcome or greeting message to name the AI explicitly ("I'm an AI assistant"). If you added a chatbot via a script tag pasted into your theme or via a plugin's custom-code setting, the widget vendor typically exposes a config option like introMessage or welcomeText — use it. Do not rely on a small "powered by AI" logo in the corner; the disclosure needs to be in the conversation stream.
Wix
Wix Chat itself is a human-agent tool and does not need this disclosure. If you have added an AI chatbot via the Wix App Market (Certainly, Tidio, HeyMarvin), open the app's settings and edit the greeting to identify it as AI. If you injected a third-party widget via Settings > Custom Code, edit the widget's config in the same script snippet so the introduction message names it as an AI assistant.
Squarespace
Squarespace does not ship a native AI chat product. If your site has an AI chatbot it was added via Code Injection or via a marketplace extension. Open the extension's settings or the script config in Settings > Advanced > Code Injection and set the welcome message so the first thing the user sees identifies the widget as AI. If the vendor gives you no way to change the greeting, either replace them or add a visible text notice next to the chat button ("Chat with our AI assistant") using a Code block.
Notes
Some chat vendors inject their widget only after the page has loaded (via a script that runs on DOMContentLoaded), so a static scanner sometimes cannot see the widget at all — a false-negative. Conversely, this scanner flags any page containing a known vendor script even if the widget is not currently AI-powered; check whether AI is actually enabled in the vendor's dashboard before rewriting your greeting.
Check your own site
Our accessibility statement scan is free and reports findings only — we do not certify sites.