Southwest Michigan Wine Portal

A note on the chatbot

The portal originally launched in 2023 with a custom AI chatbot powered by OpenAI's API and Fuse.js fuzzy search. The idea was to let visitors ask natural-language questions — "what wineries are open on Sundays?" or "which grapes grow best near the lake?" — and get curated answers drawn from the portal's own database.

After two years of user feedback and informal A/B testing, the chatbot consistently underperformed expectations. Users who engaged with it spent less time on the rest of the portal. Most questions it handled well — winery hours, directions, variety recommendations — were already answered more efficiently by the map and database pages themselves. The chatbot created a second, slower path to the same information, and its presence on the page competed for attention with the content users actually came for.

The feature still exists in the codebase but is no longer a focal point of the experience. The takeaway is straightforward: a chatbot wrapper around a small, well-structured dataset rarely adds value over good navigation and search. The underlying data is what matters.

This may be worth considering for small wineries evaluating paid chatbot add-ons for their websites. If your content is already organized and searchable, a conversational layer may not improve the visitor experience — and the cost of maintaining it (API fees, prompt tuning, hallucination monitoring) often exceeds the benefit.