How long a website chatbot keeps things, and what deletion means

Retention is the question your own customers will eventually ask you, so it is worth being able to answer it about your chatbot without checking. This guide separates the kinds of thing a website chatbot stores, because they have genuinely different lifetimes, and says what is true for Allinaa.

Five different kinds of thing, five different answers

1. The conversation - what the visitor typed and what the assistant replied.
2. The inquiry - the contact details and request a visitor deliberately submitted. This is a business record, not chat history.
3. Files a visitor uploaded.
4. Operational records - the audit trail, notification queue and usage counts that make the service accountable.
5. Visit counts - the fact that a page was opened at all.

Lumping these together is how vendors give vague answers. A business that deletes conversations after thirty days still has to keep the inquiry that became a customer.

Conversations

In Allinaa a conversation stays available in your panel so you can read what people asked, answer what the assistant could not, and generate your monthly report from real activity. The visitor's session itself expires after 30 days, which is what makes a returning visitor's chat start fresh. Starting a new conversation closes the old one rather than deleting it, because a business that cannot look back at what was said to a customer has lost a record it may need.

Inquiries are business records

When a visitor confirms a request with their contact details and their consent, that is your record of a lead or a customer, with a status, your private notes and CSV export. It is not deleted on a chat schedule, and it should not be: you may need it for an order, a dispute or your accounts. Treat it exactly as you treat the same information arriving by e-mail, under whatever retention rule your business already has for enquiries.

Files have the shortest life

Uploads are the riskiest thing to keep and the easiest to forget. On Allinaa Premium files sent by visitors are stored privately, served only to your signed-in team, and deleted on a retention schedule rather than kept indefinitely; the default is a matter of weeks. If a file matters to the job - a drawing, a claim photograph - save it into your own systems, because the copy in the chat is not an archive. Say that to your team once and it saves an awkward conversation later. See files customers send.

The records that exist to keep the service honest

Some things are kept precisely so that questions can be answered later: the audit trail of who in your team changed what and when, the record of every notification sent and whether it arrived, the log of any time-limited support access an Allinaa staff member was granted and what they read under it, and the counts behind your usage and reports. These are deliberately not disposable - an audit trail you can delete is not an audit trail. They hold actions and metadata rather than conversation text.

Visit counts, and the version that cannot be undeleted because it was never collected

The most reliable retention is the data you never store. Allinaa's own website counts visits without a cookie and without keeping any address or browser string: a visitor is a hash of those plus a salt that is thrown away each night, so yesterday's hashes cannot be matched against today's by anyone, including Allinaa. There is nothing to delete, because the identifying part was never written down. Where you can build a feature that way, it beats any retention policy. See what visitors asked for.

What deletion actually means

Three honest caveats that apply to any vendor, Allinaa included:

• Backups. A row deleted today is still in last night's backup until that backup ages out. A vendor who says deletion is instant everywhere has not thought about backups.
• The model provider. The text of a reply passed through a provider to be generated. Ask what that provider retains; for Allinaa it is named in the privacy policy.
• E-mail. Once a notification has been sent to you, the content is in your mailbox and under your retention rules, not the chatbot's.

The three decisions to make before you install one

Decide who in your business may read conversations; decide where a file that matters gets saved properly; and decide what your own retention rule for enquiries is, so your chatbot answer matches the rest of your business. None of the three is technical, and all three take ten minutes.

Questions people ask about this

Can I have a conversation deleted if a visitor asks?

Ask Allinaa support and say which conversation and why. The request is handled by a person and recorded, rather than being a button that anybody can press without a trace.

Does the chatbot store credit card details?

No, and no chat should. A visitor who starts typing card details into a chat is doing something the business should actively prevent; the assistant is not asked for them and your knowledge should tell people not to send them.

Does my own retention policy need updating?

If you have one, add the chatbot to it - one line about conversations, one about inquiries, one about files - and keep the file line honest about the fact that uploads are temporary.