A lot of SEOs and webmasters have been buzzing about chatbots, a computer program which conducts a conversation via auditory or textual methods. Many are playing with the idea of adding one to their web site to engage with their users in an automated fashion. But it seems Google’s John Mueller is not a fan of chatbots on the whole.

John said in the hangout yesterday at the 18:26 mark that “most chatbots I see are really basic and useless so.” He added “I don’t think that randomly adding chatbots to the page, makes that page better.”

John Mueller explained that it is not good to “artificially keeping people on your web site even though they don’t want to actually buy or convert.” So don’t add chatbots just because they are chatbots. If they can genuinely help your users, sure – but otherwise nope.

Here is the video embed:

Here is the transcript:

Forum discussion at Google+.