The realistic breakdown
Signing up and registering your website: a couple of minutes. Pasting the snippet: a couple more, assuming you have access to your theme or a header/footer plugin. The first content crawl: a few minutes, depending on site size — a five-page business site finishes fast, a large catalog takes longer. Testing it with a handful of real questions: fifteen minutes if you're being thorough about it.
Add that up and many small sites finish the hands-on work the same day. The chatbot can answer from what has already been read; wait for the first crawl to finish before you treat it as fully set up.
What actually takes longer
Not the setup — the refinement. Reviewing early conversations and adding a few FAQ snippets for gaps you notice is worth spending real time on over the first week or two, even though the bot is technically live and functional from day one. This isn't a blocker to launch; it's ongoing improvement that happens in parallel with the bot already doing useful work.
Think of it less like a project with a hard finish line and more like publishing a page and then editing it based on feedback — except the 'feedback' here is real visitor questions showing up in your transcripts automatically.
What could make it take longer
The main things that add real time: a very large site with thousands of pages, which takes longer to fully crawl; a content security policy that needs an admin to allowlist the script; or genuinely thin site content that needs writing before the chatbot has much to work with in the first place. None of these are common for a typical small business site, but they're worth knowing about if your situation is unusual.
