A lot of small business owners do not run one business. They run a plumbing firm and a bathroom showroom, or a dental practice and a separate cosmetic clinic next door, or a holiday let company with three differently branded websites. The customers overlap a little. The prices, policies and tone do not overlap at all.
That is where running multiple chatbots from one account gets awkward. The temptation is to build one assistant, feed it everything and let it sort out which brand a visitor means. It will not sort it out reliably, and the first time the showroom assistant quotes the plumbing firm's call-out fee, you will wish you had spent an extra hour at the start.
The fix is mostly discipline: separate knowledge per brand, names your future self can search, and a plan that matches how many businesses you actually run.
Why one shared assistant goes wrong
An assistant answers from the content it has been given. If that content includes two refund policies, two sets of opening hours and two price lists, it has to guess which one applies to the person asking. Visitors rarely say which brand they mean, because in their head they are simply on your website.
The problems tend to show up in quiet ways:
- Crossed facts. The cosmetic clinic's assistant mentions NHS appointments because the dental practice's pages were in the same pile.
- Muddled tone. A playful brand voice leaks into a firm that sells to solicitors.
- Messy leads. Enquiries from both sites land in one list with no clue which business they are for, so someone has to read every transcript to route them.
- Harder fixes. When a wrong answer turns up, you cannot tell which brand's content caused it.
None of these are dramatic on day one. They add up over months.
How the pieces fit together
It helps to think in three layers. Your account is the login and the bill. Inside it sit companies, which are the separate businesses. Inside each company sit assistants, each with its own knowledge, name, persona, colours and actions.
The limits are simple, and they are the thing to check before you start building rather than after.
| Plan | Price | Assistants | Companies | Useful for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 1 | 1 | Trying one brand on one site |
| Starter | $20 a month ($17 annually) | 3 | 1 | One business with a few sites or departments |
| Pro | $59 a month ($49 annually) | 10 | Up to 3 | Owners running two or three distinct businesses |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Custom | Groups and agencies beyond that |
If you run two genuinely separate businesses, Pro is the plan built for it, because it is the one that separates companies. Branding removal also sits on Pro and above, which matters if one brand is premium and you do not want a vendor badge on it. Full details are on the pricing page.
Keeping knowledge separate per brand
The rule is boring and it works: each assistant only gets content that belongs to its brand. There are four ways to teach an assistant, and each one needs a little care when brands overlap.
- Crawl only that brand's domain. Point the crawler at the showroom site for the showroom assistant. If both brands live on one domain in different folders, check which pages were picked up and remove the ones that belong to the other business. Our guide to what the website crawler picks up explains how to review that list.
- Split shared documents. A group price list PDF covering both firms should become two files. It is ten minutes of work and it removes the single biggest source of crossed answers.
- Write the description per brand. The plain-language description of the business is where you set who it serves, where it operates and what it does not do. Say explicitly that it does not handle the sister company's work, and name where to send those people.
- Keep Q&A pairs brand-specific. If both businesses get asked about parking, write two answers, even if they are nearly identical.
Where brands genuinely share something, such as a head office address or a single accounts team, it is fine to include it in both. Just include it deliberately.
Naming conventions that save you later
Once you have five or six assistants, names become the thing that stops mistakes. Pick a pattern and stick to it everywhere: the assistant, its webhook, its Slack channel and the lead source in your CRM.
A pattern that holds up is Brand - Site - Purpose. For example:
Harbour Plumbing - main site - enquiriesHarbour Plumbing - emergency page - urgentTidewater Bathrooms - showroom site - design consultations
The visitor never sees these names. They see the display name and persona you set for each assistant, so the showroom one can be called something friendly while its internal name stays dull and searchable.
Apply the same brand prefix to support ticket subjects and lead sources. When someone on your team opens the inbox on a Monday, the first word of every item should tell them which business it belongs to.
A worked example you can adapt
Say you run a plumbing firm and a bathroom showroom, and each site gets around 60 chats a month. Your numbers will differ, so swap in your own.
- Plumbing needs two assistants: one for the main site and one for an emergency landing page that pushes hard for a phone number and address.
- The showroom needs one assistant that captures design consultation requests with room size and budget attached.
- That is three assistants across two companies. Starter would cover the assistant count, but only Pro separates the two companies, so Pro is the fit.
- At 180 chats a month with several messages each, 9,000 messages on Pro leaves plenty of headroom. If you were at 1,500 chats a month, you would want to look at usage before committing.
Then route the output. Plumbing leads go by webhook to the job management system. Showroom leads go to a Slack channel the designer watches. Neither team has to filter out the other's work.
Test the walls between brands
Before you put any assistant live, ask it questions that belong to the other business. Ask the showroom assistant for an emergency call-out price. Ask the plumbing assistant about tile samples.
The right result is a polite decline plus a pointer or a captured enquiry, not an answer borrowed from the wrong brand. If it does answer, some shared content has slipped in. Find it, remove it and test again. Our note on how assistants handle questions they were not trained for covers what good declining looks like.
Repeat this test whenever you add a document, because that is when overlap usually creeps back.
What to do this week
Write down every brand, every site and every distinct purpose you want covered. Count the assistants and companies, then pick the plan that fits the count rather than the one that feels about right.
Next, split any shared documents and decide your naming pattern before you create a single assistant. Build one brand fully, run the cross-brand test, and only then copy the approach to the second. The features page lists the per-assistant settings worth deciding up front, so each brand gets its own persona and colour from day one instead of inheriting the first one's.