My ability is not triggering

This is the report we get most, and it almost always comes down to the same thing. Work down the list in order; each step is faster to check than the one after it.

1. Is the ability active, and is it an AI ability?#

Two separate switches, and it is easy to have one without the other.

• Active — a disabled ability is never offered to the assistant.
• AI ability — a workflow that is not marked as an AI ability can only be

reached by keyword or by a bound conversation starter, never by the assistant choosing it.

2. Is the bot in AI mode?#

In keyword mode the assistant does not choose anything. Abilities are reachable only through the exact keywords you listed.

If the bot is in keyword mode and no ability has keywords set, nothing can trigger at all. Check the bot's Conversation settings.

3. Read the description as a stranger#

This is the fix about eight times in ten.

Open the ability and read its description as if you had never seen your business. The assistant has your description and nothing else — it cannot see the workflow, the node names, or what you meant.

Ask three questions:

• Does it name the thing? "If the user asks about it" tells the assistant

nothing.

• Does it say when NOT to fire? Without a boundary it fires on loosely

related questions — and, just as often, the assistant hedges and fires nothing.

• Would a real visitor's phrasing match? If it demands an exact phrase, most

visitors never reach it.

Writing a good ability description has the full five rules. Chatleadr also checks your description against them after you save and tells you which one it thinks you broke.

4. Count your abilities#

The assistant chooses by comparing descriptions, and that gets harder as the list grows. If you have five abilities and two of them are described similarly, they compete — and the one that wins may not be the one you expected.

Read them side by side. If two descriptions could plausibly match the same message, tighten the boundaries on both.

5. Check the execution log#

If the ability is triggering and then failing silently, this is where it shows. The bot's execution log lists each run, which node it reached, and where it stopped. An ability that starts and dies at an API node looks identical to one that never triggered, from the visitor's side.

6. Try the phrasing directly#

Send the bot the exact message you expect to trigger it, in the preview. If it works in preview and not on your site, the problem is not the ability — it is which bot is on the page. Check the bot key in your install snippet.

Still not working?#

Send us three things and we can usually answer straight away:

1. The exact message you sent.
2. The ability's description, copied verbatim.
3. What the bot said instead.

That third one matters more than it sounds. A bot that answers from the knowledge base instead of triggering is a description problem; a bot that says it cannot help is usually something else.