Research / Chat Index
Chatonbo Chat Index
Monthly statistics from the AI assistants running on real store and business websites: when visitors chat, on what device, how often a chat becomes a lead, and what they ask. Computed from the live data every month, same definitions as The State of Ecommerce Chat 2026.
Baseline to quote: 39% of website chats start outside business hours (5,470 conversations on 246 live assistants, June to September 2026, visitor's local time). The monthly figure below moves around that baseline as the mix of stores changes. Study and method.
Updated October 24, 2026. Free to cite with attribution (CC BY 4.0). Completed months only.
| Month | After hours | On a phone | Became a lead | Top topics |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The index is being computed. Check back in an hour. | ||||
How it is measured
Scope: every conversation opened on the live website of a Chatonbo customer in the month (storefront sessions only). Chatonbo's own workspaces, internal test accounts, app-store review installs and dashboard test chats are excluded. Only completed months are shown, and only when the month's sample is large enough to be meaningful. The figures are shares of real conversations on live customer sites, not estimates.
After hours: the conversation start, shifted by one fixed offset per visitor country, falls outside 09:00 to 17:59. Conversations from countries outside the offset map are left out of that one figure, so treat it as accurate to a few points. Phone: classified from the browser user agent. Lead: the visitor left a name, email or phone number in the chat. Topics: the assistant's own classification of the conversation.
The underlying report with full tables and methodology is The State of Ecommerce Chat 2026.
Cite this
39% of website chat conversations start outside business hours. Source: Chatonbo analysis of 5,470 real conversations on 246 live AI assistants, June to September 2026. chatonbo.com/research/chat-index
Chatonbo (2026). Chatonbo Chat Index: monthly statistics from live AI chat assistants on store and business websites. https://chatonbo.com/research/chat-index
Free to quote with attribution (CC BY 4.0). Download the baseline study as a PDF