Chatbots are often the first point of contact with prospects and customers and directly influence customer experience, brand perception, and operational efficiency. A Chatbot Audit identifies weaknesses before they create reputational or business risk. It provides a structured performance baseline and highlights optimization potential in containment, user guidance, and governance readiness.

Organizations using AI chatbots for customer service, sales, onboarding, support or internal employee guidance should consider a Chatbot Audit.

The Level 1 Chatbot Audit includes structured use case testing, hallucination stress scenarios, redirection behavior analysis, dialog flow observation, and (optionally) multilingual consistency checks.

Performance is evaluated across response quality (50% weight), speed (20%), user interface (15%), and dialog quality (15%), resulting in a weighted overall performance score.

Click here to see a sample audit.

The audit follows the 9senses AI Auditing Framework. It applies real-world functional testing, edge-case scenarios (e.g., ambiguous or invalid inputs), hallucination stress tests, and consistency checks.

Each dimension is scored on a standardized 1–5 scale and aggregated into an overall performance index to ensure comparability and objectivity.

Please click here to see a sample report with a methodology explanation.

Hallucinations, the creation of invalid or invented content, poses a serious reputation and compliance risk. The audit includes targeted hallucination stress testing.

We deliberately introduce invalid references, misspellings, and ambiguous prompts to assess whether the chatbot fabricates information or requests clarification. The evaluation examines entity validation, grounding behavior, and escalation logic.

Level 1 includes a preliminary external review of observable compliance and transparency indicators (AI disclosure, GDPR-relevant UI elements, accessibility).

A full regulatory and governance analysis - including documentation and architecture review - could be part of a tailored Level 2 Chatbot Audit.

No. The Level 1 Chatbot Audit is a behavioral (black-box) evaluation. It assesses publicly observable system behavior from a user and governance perspective without reviewing internal architecture, training data, retrieval systems, or security infrastructure.

Some technical assumptions that can be inferred from observed behavior will be shared. Technical deep dives can be included in tailored Level 2 Audits.

For Level 1, we primarily require access to the live chatbot interface and a briefing on usage context (e.g., intended business objectives, target audience, supported languages). No internal system documentation or technical configuration access is required for the behavioral audit.

If you do not book the Use Case Creation option, we will provide you with access to a form to enter your own use cases. If you select the Use Case Option, we will define use cases based on your basic briefing and send them to you for review before executing the audit.

The Level 1 Chatbot Audit is completed within five business days after we have received your briefing and (if required) access information.

Should you have booked the Use Case Creation Option, please allow for 2 additional business days for the delivery of our use case suggestions.

All audit work and deliverables are handled under confidentiality. Reports and findings are shared only with the customer. Numeric audit results are used for best-in-class benchmarking.

The 9senses Level 1 Chatbot Audit can be tailored to your chatbot’s setup and business context. In addition to the core behavioral audit, you can select the following options:

• Use Case Creation
  In the basic version, we will ask you to define use cases internally. If you select this option, we define 3–5 realistic, business-relevant test scenarios aligned with your customer journeys (e.g., service booking, product comparison, account support). Select this option if you do not yet have structured evaluation cases.

• Open Search Bot Review
  This is needed if your chatbot retrieves information from external websites or search engines. This option evaluates source consistency, grounding behavior, and increased hallucination exposure.

• Internal / Login-Based Bot Review
  For chatbots accessible only behind login (e.g., customer portals or employee systems). This ensures evaluation within authenticated environments and role-specific flows.

• Translation & Multilingual Testing
  Includes structured verification of one additional language, focusing on consistency, language switching behavior, and translation accuracy.

• Executive Briefing
  A structured management-level walkthrough of findings. We translate audit results into decision priorities, risk implications, and concrete next steps.

These options allow you to adapt the Chatbot Audit to your technical architecture, risk exposure, and governance requirements.

Level 1 is an external behavioral audit focused on user-facing performance and experience.

Level 2 is an open-book analysis tailored to your needs or concerns. For example, it could concern your bot's technical architecture, retrieval systems (RAG), governance, compliance, risk management, and business value modeling.

A Level 2 Audit should be considered when the chatbot performs below 3.5 in answer or dialog quality and is prominently visible on your website.

Equally, a Level 2 audit is warranted if the bot has an important role in a closed user group context (e.g. customers or employees) with associated business risk.

Yes. The 9senses Chatbot Audit framework applies to rule-based bots, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, and large language model-based assistants. The methodology focuses on observable performance, containment behavior, hallucination risk, and governance readiness rather than the technical foundation.