Archivist AI

Archivist AI turns your WordPress article archive into a conversational search engine. A floating chat bubble lets visitors ask natural-language questions — “What’s been written about food retail trends since January?” — and get AI answers grounded in your own published articles, with links back to the sources.

For your readers:

• Anonymous — no account, no login, no signup wall
• Multi-turn chat with follow-up questions
• Every answer cites the original articles

For you:

• Five-minute setup: paste one OpenAI API key, click Index, done
• Embeddings stored in your own WordPress database — no external vector database, no extra services
• Cost estimate shown before indexing starts
• Daily spending cap and per-visitor rate limiting built in
• You pay OpenAI directly at list price — no markup, no middleman
• Only published, public posts are ever indexed

The free version indexes your entire archive, shows full cost/usage reporting, and has no caps. Pro adds visitor-question analytics (what readers ask, and which questions your archive could not answer), smart answer caching, and subscriber-only mode.

External services

This plugin connects to the OpenAI API (api.openai.com) to provide its core functionality. It is not usable without it.

What is sent and when:

• When you index your content (manually from the admin, or automatically when a post is published/updated), the text of your published, public posts is sent to OpenAI to generate embeddings.
• When a visitor asks a question in the chat, the question text (and the recent turns of that conversation) is sent to OpenAI to interpret the question and generate an answer based on your indexed articles.
• No personal data about visitors (names, emails, IP addresses, accounts) is sent to OpenAI. Drafts, private posts, and password-protected posts are never sent.

The site owner provides their own OpenAI API key and is billed by OpenAI directly. This service is provided by OpenAI: Terms of Use, Privacy Policy, API data usage policy.

This plugin also uses the Freemius SDK for licensing and (strictly opt-in) usage tracking. No data is sent to Freemius unless the site administrator explicitly opts in: Freemius Privacy Policy, Terms.