Symptom, cause, and a way to tell which cause it is

Everything between pasting the tag and seeing the launcher.

• The chat widget is not appearing on my siteThe tag is on the page, the page loads normally, and there is no launcher in the corner.
• This site is not on the allowlist for this assistantThe widget does not appear, or a conversation fails to start, and the message names a site you were sure you had already added.
• A Content Security Policy is blocking the chat widgetNothing renders, or the launcher renders unstyled, or the launcher works and the panel never appears. The console carries a policy violation naming a directive.
• The launcher appears but the chat panel will not openThe launcher renders, responds to hover and click, and nothing opens above it.
• Site CSS is affecting the chat widget, or not affecting itA CSS rule targeting the widget has no effect, or the widget looks untouched by a global style that changes everything else on the page.
• The chat widget tag is on the page twiceNothing looks wrong, but a key change or an appearance change only takes effect sometimes, or not at all.
• The chat widget is loading on pages it should notThe launcher appears during checkout, on an internal page, on a staging copy, or on a site you did not knowingly install it on.

What was indexed, what was not, and why a refusal is sometimes correct.

• The crawl only indexed one page of my websiteThe source on the Knowledge tab says Ready and the line under its name says 1 document, on a site with far more pages than that.
• The crawler is skipping my docs subdomainA crawl of the main site finished and none of the documentation, help centre or shop pages are in it, even though they are linked from the navigation.
• This page builds its content with JavaScriptA page you can read perfectly well in a browser produces no document, or produces one with none of the content you expected in it.
• The assistant says it does not know when the answer is on my siteA visitor asks something your documentation covers and gets a refusal instead of an answer.
• The assistant is quoting an old version of my pageYou updated a page days ago, the site shows the new wording, and the assistant keeps giving the old one.
• The chat answers are far too longReplies run to six or seven paragraphs in a panel the size of a phone screen, and dropping the length setting either changes nothing or starts cutting sentences in half.
• The source under an answer points at the wrong pageThe answer is right, or close to right, and the numbered source under it opens a page that does not obviously contain the line you just read.
• A file uploaded fine and never turns up in an answerThe file is sitting in the list on the Knowledge tab and no answer has ever quoted it or listed it as a source.
• The assistant shows a stock sentence instead of an answerA visitor gets a stock apology rather than an answer, and it is not the one you expected to be there.
• The assistant is replying in the wrong languageA visitor writes in one language and gets a reply, a refusal or a form back in another.

Layout, mobile, enquiries that did not arrive, conversations that are not listed.

• The chat widget is covering my cookie bannerThe launcher sits over a cookie banner, a sticky footer bar, a floating basket button or a back to top control, and whatever is underneath cannot be clicked.
• The chat panel is behind the keyboard on a phoneOn a phone the panel takes the whole screen, and once the keyboard opens the field you are typing into is behind it, or the send control is below the visible edge.
• No email arrives when a visitor leaves their detailsA visitor filled in the form asking to be contacted, they saw the thank you, and nobody received an email.
• Conversations are missing from the dashboard listYou know somebody used the assistant, and the conversation is not in the list for that assistant.
• A visitor is hitting the message limit on the widgetThe assistant stops answering after several messages in quick succession, and starts working again a minute or so later.
• The assistant stops replying if the chat is left openA conversation that was working stops answering. The visitor sees the offline message you configured, and everything works again the moment the page is reloaded.
• The widget greeting is not the one I setThe panel opens with a greeting, an input placeholder or a name that is not what the Appearance tab says it should be.

Open the browser console before anything else. The loader says nothing on the page and quite a lot in the console, and three of the failures above name themselves outright there.

Then wait a minute. The configuration that carries the appearance, the status and the allowed sites is cached for that long, so a change made seconds ago has genuinely not taken effect yet, and chasing that is how an afternoon disappears.

24 failure modes documented.