Idle follow-ups and page targeting

Two agent settings shape when an agent speaks and which agent answers: idle follow-ups (the agent nudges a visitor who went quiet) and page targeting (different agents for different sections of one website). Both live in the agent builder, on the Rules & limits tab, and both are saved with the agent's draft and go live when you publish.

Idle follow-ups#

When a visitor stops replying, a short "Are you still there?" often brings them back. Turn on Send a follow-up when the visitor stays silent and choose:

• Wait (seconds): how long the visitor must stay silent after the agent's reply, from 30 seconds to an hour.
• At most this many nudges: one to three, each sent again after the same wait if the visitor is still silent.
• Nudge texts: one per line, used in order; the last line repeats. Variables such as {{visitor.name|there}} work.

A nudge appears in the chat like any other agent message, and visitors with the chat closed see the unread badge. It is delivered by SiteTrellis's background worker, which checks once a minute, so a 60-second wait can take up to two minutes.

• A message from the visitor cancels the pending nudge and starts the count again. Ending the chat, or a teammate taking over, cancels it too.
• Nudges are sent only in chats the AI is handling, only after the visitor has written at least once, and not outside business hours when the agent is set to show an offline message.
• A nudge does not count as visitor activity: the chat still ends after End chat after idle minutes. You cannot publish a follow-up that would arrive after that.
• Playground tests are never nudged. In the inbox, nudges are tagged "idle follow-up" in the transcript.

Different agents for different pages#

One site can have several agents, for example a sales agent for the pricing pages and a support agent for the help center. Under Where this agent answers, list URL path patterns the agent should serve (Only on these pages) and patterns it should never serve (Never on these pages). The asterisk matches any characters, patterns ignore upper and lower case and trailing slashes, and a pattern that starts with https:// is matched against the full address. The query string is ignored.

{
  "targeting": {
    "include": ["/pricing*", "/plans/*"],
    "exclude": ["/help/legal*"]
  }
}

When a chat starts, SiteTrellis picks the agent for the page the visitor is on:

1. Agents that are disabled or unpublished, or whose rules exclude the page, are out.
2. An agent whose "Only on these pages" list matches comes before an agent that has no such list.
3. Among equals, the site's default agent wins, then the oldest agent.

If no agent serves a page, the widget is not shown there; it appears again when the visitor navigates, even inside a single-page app, to a page that has one. A conversation keeps its agent for its whole life; "Start new chat" picks the agent of the page the visitor is on at that moment. Publishing refuses an agent that excludes every page.

The site-wide Where it appears rules in the site's Appearance tab still apply on top, and are the place to hide the widget entirely, for example on checkout pages. See Widget customization and Escalation and takeover for the related handoff settings.