WordPress AI chat plugins make 6–11 outbound requests per visitor question. Architecture writeup of an alternative.

Originally published at pagecoder.ai/blog/why-your-ai-chatbot-is-a-tracker . Cross-posted here for the dev.to community. Last week we sat in a café in Wien with a friend — a freelance dev who's been shipping WordPress sites for a decade. He'd just installed an AI chat plugin for a client, a small cosmetics brand. It looked nice. Brand colors, custom name. Then he opened the network tab. "Three. Four. Five." He scrolled. "Eight. Wait — eleven? Where is this one going?" Eleven outbound requests. P