We Reviewed the Chatbots on 100 Small Business Websites. Here’s What Anyone Can See.

AgentCheck by CyberShield · November 1, 2026

Small businesses are putting AI chatbots on their websites faster than they can check what those chatbots expose. So we looked — passively, from the outside, the same way any visitor (or competitor, or scammer) could. Here is what we found on 100 U.S. small business websites across 30 states.

The findings

1. Three platforms run most small business chatbots.

Gorgias Chat (23 of 100), ServiceTitan (21 of 100), and Broadly WebChat (15 of 100) together power 59% of the sites we reviewed. That’s efficient — but it also means one platform’s default settings, and any weakness in them, repeat across dozens of independent businesses at once. Add Shopify’s own Inbox widget (8 of 100) and the picture is clear: small business chat is platform business.

2. On 66 of 100 sites, the chatbot’s configuration is at least partly public.

On 5 sites the widget settings are embedded directly in the page code; on 61 more, the loader and its parameters (organization and location IDs) are visible to anyone who views the page source. Some of that is by design — but most owners we talk to have never looked at what their widget publishes.

3. On 9 of 100 sites, we couldn’t even identify which chatbot the business is running.

The widget loads from generic or custom code with no vendor we could name. If the owner can’t tell which bot is on their own site, they almost certainly haven’t reviewed its settings. (For the record: we actively looked for Tidio, Crisp, LiveChat, Drift, HubSpot Chat, Freshchat, Smartsupp, and JivoChat across roughly 145 candidate sites in our final batch — and confirmed none of them on the small business sites we sampled. The household names of the chat industry are largely absent from Main Street; platform-bundled widgets won.)

4. Missing basics are still common.

5 of 100 sites have no privacy policy link on their homepage — the page where a chatbot may collect names, phone numbers, and messages. 20 of 100 don’t send an HSTS header, and 5 of 100 don’t force a redirect from HTTP to HTTPS. (Credit where due: all 100 sites do run HTTPS with a valid certificate.)

5. “Keys in the code” headlines need a fact-check — we did one.

Automated pattern scans flagged key- or token-like values in the public code of 67 of 100 sites. Then we manually re-checked flagged cases instead of publishing the scary number. Every case we classified turned out to be a public-by-design token: Shopify’s Storefront API token, which Shopify prints into every store’s page code by design; scheduling-widget keys that the widget itself requires in the page; shared platform keys identical across franchise locations; a search provider’s public key. Four flagged cases from our first batch could not be reproduced on re-check at all, and three apparent “OpenAI keys” in our final batch turned out to be the letters “sk-” inside an SVG mask attribute and a product color named “dusk-violet.” Confirmed server secrets leaked in public code: zero. Pattern scanners cry wolf; context is everything.

How we checked

Our method was deliberately boring: five passive checks against publicly visible pages and scripts — the same five checks as the AgentCheck free mini-check. Which vendor’s chatbot is installed; whether key- or token-like values appear in public code; whether the bot’s configuration is public; whether HTTPS, certificate, redirect, and HSTS are in order; and whether a privacy policy is linked. We never interacted with the chatbots, sent no messages to the businesses, and recorded no key values — only the fact and type of each finding. A vendor was only counted when its chat loader was confirmed in the page’s HTML.

The takeaway

Nothing here required hacking. Every item above is visible to anyone who opens a browser’s “view source.” The risk for a small business usually isn’t a dramatic breach — it’s quiet exposure: a widget collecting personal details next to a missing privacy policy, settings nobody has read, and a platform default copied onto thousands of sites. If you run a chatbot on your business website, it’s worth ten minutes to see what it shows the world. AgentCheck’s free mini-check runs these same five checks for a single site, so you can see your own results before anyone else does.

Sample: 100 U.S. small business websites with a confirmed chat widget, reviewed November 1, 2026. Findings describe publicly visible code and configuration at the time of review; individual results change as sites are updated. Automated pattern matches for keys and tokens are reported as matches, not leaks: all manually re-checked matches were public-by-design tokens or could not be reproduced, and no confirmed server secrets were found.