Everything you need to know before deploying CRSTBL.

CRSTBL is a conversation-agent platform that turns your business information — menus, catalogs, service descriptions, policies, FAQs — into an AI agent your visitors can talk to. Instead of forcing customers to search menus, click through navigation, or scan long pages, CRSTBL lets them ask questions in their own words and get answers back.

CRSTBL is pronounced “Crystal Ball,” and the name is deliberate: conversations reveal what customers actually want, which is what most website analytics can’t tell you.

CRSTA is the AI conversation agent at the core of the platform. When a visitor talks to CRSTBL on your website, business page, or kiosk, they’re talking to CRSTA. See the full explainer in What is CRSTA?

Conversation Agents are the deployed units — your website concierge is one; a lobby kiosk might be another. Each runs on CRSTA.

Character Identity is the reusable brand persona layered on top — the voice and tone the agent uses. One Character Identity can drive multiple Conversation Agents so they sound like the same brand across every surface.

General-purpose AI tools answer from what they were trained on. CRSTBL answers from your business information — the menu, product catalog, or service descriptions you provide — and won’t make up things you didn’t give it.

CRSTBL is a controlled business conversation system, not a public chatbot. It’s built to represent your brand and use your data.

Businesses whose customers frequently need help finding something — a menu item, a product, a service, a location, a policy, an answer. That includes:

• Restaurants and food service
• Retailers with catalogs
• Professional service firms
• Manufacturers and distributors
• Multi-location and franchise businesses
• Real estate and medical practices

If your website visitors often have questions that a knowledgeable employee could answer, CRSTBL is designed for you.

Three main ones:

• Website drop-off. Visitors who can’t find what they came for leave. CRSTBL helps them find it through conversation instead of navigation.
• Repetitive customer questions. The same questions come in over and over — hours, availability, product specs, dietary restrictions. CRSTBL handles them 24/7.
• No visibility into customer intent. Traditional analytics tells you what visitors did, not what they wanted. Conversations tell you what they wanted.

Anything you give it. Common sources:

• Website content
• Product catalogs and menus
• Service descriptions
• PDFs, spec sheets, brochures
• Internal documentation and FAQs
• Business policies (returns, delivery, hours, locations)

The quality of CRSTBL’s answers scales with the quality of the information you provide during onboarding.

Yes. CRSTBL can guide visitors through a discovery conversation — asking about their needs, understanding constraints (budget, size, use case, dietary preference) — and recommend the right option from your catalog or menu.

Traditional chatbots follow scripted decision trees and break on anything outside the script. CRSTBL uses AI to interpret natural language, understands context across a conversation, and answers from your real business information without pre-scripting.

Full comparison: CRSTBL vs Traditional Chatbots.

No. CRSTBL adds a conversation layer on top of your existing website. Visitors can continue browsing normally, and CRSTBL is there when they have a question that navigation doesn’t answer well.

Most businesses adopt CRSTBL without redesigning their site.

Cumae — pronounced “Cue-Me” — gives your business a controlled source for the facts AI systems and business partners need to understand your products, services, locations and policies.

You publish a business-controlled record, monitor material AI answers against it, and govern which registered applications and approved partners can access more complete information. Full explainer: What is Cumae?

Direction. CRSTA runs the conversations on your own surfaces — website, kiosk, or app — answering your visitors directly. Cumae publishes and governs the authoritative business information used in AI-driven discovery, for the moment a customer asks an AI system instead of asking you.

One is the answer you give. The other is the source behind the answer given about you. Cumae governs the information and the access to it; it does not govern what a third-party AI platform ultimately says.

Either works on its own. Start with CRSTA if the priority is converting visitors already on your site. Start with Cumae if the priority is being found and described accurately by AI assistants. They are separate products and can be added in either order.

AEO (AI Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) describe the practice of making business information discoverable and usable by AI chatbots and large language models. They are the AI-era counterpart to SEO.

The practical difference: SEO competes for a position among links someone will click, while AEO competes to be the source an answer is built from.

No — keep it. A Google Business Profile covers Google Maps and Search, and it was built for keyword search rather than for a customer asking a question with conditions attached.

Cumae is designed as a neutral, merchant-authorized source that approved applications can register to access, carrying depth a directory listing was never built to hold — sub-ingredient detail, allergen states, policy conditions, partner-specific terms. It complements your Google Business Profile rather than replacing it.

Only what you approve, and how widely it travels depends on the access policy you set for it.

Your public identity record is Open — company name, canonical website, general description, public location information, general product or service categories, and a link to your current authoritative information. Anyone can read it, including unregistered AI systems and search engines.

Your full Cumae record sits behind Registered access and can carry much more: products, menus, services, hours, attributes, prices, availability, warranties, policies, qualifications and preparation or safety limitations. Partner-specific views are Allowlisted, and restricted information can stay Private to your own agents and integrations.

You update your approved record directly. Registered and allowlisted applications retrieve the current approved version according to their integration terms; open web and external AI systems refresh on their own schedules.

They are access policies, not products or plans. Open is your public identity record, readable without registration. Registered is your full general Cumae record, available to identified applications that have accepted CRSTBL’s terms. Allowlisted is a partner-specific view you approve individually. Private is restricted information available only to your own company-controlled agents and integrations.

A business can use several at once — identity information Open, the general record Registered, partner information Allowlisted, internal information Private. MCP, APIs and data feeds are delivery methods; they do not determine what an application is permitted to access. The access policy does.

Two ways, and neither of them costs the AI system anything.

Open records are publicly accessible to any AI system or search engine, with no registration and no agreement. Registered access to your full record is available to AI platforms that have entered an agreement with CRSTBL, under restrictions on how your information may be used — including that it may not be used to train models. You configure which of your information sits behind which policy.

No AI system pays to retrieve your record, and payment never affects retrieval, ranking or how your business is represented. A free Cumae Publish record is exactly as retrievable as a paid one. What a paid record buys is depth, verification and governance — not visibility.

No, and that is worth being clear about. Cumae supplies an authoritative source those systems can read. It cannot compel a particular model to use that source, or control how an answer is worded.

What it removes is the situation where the only material available about you is stale, partial, or second-hand.

CRSTBL supports multiple deployment surfaces:

• Website concierge (chat bubble on your existing site)
• AI-ready business page (a hosted CRSTBL page for AI engines and human visitors)
• Kiosk or tablet at a physical location
• Trade show or event booth
• Voice-enabled surfaces

Most businesses start with the website concierge and add other surfaces later.

It depends on the tier:

• CRSTA Business is designed for one-day deployment. Sign up, provide business information, and your agent is live within about 24 hours.
• CRSTA Enterprise is a 4–8 week structured onboarding process. Enterprise deployments involve organizing product catalogs, documentation, multi-location data, and integrations — the timeline reflects that complexity.

The primary deployment variable is the readiness of your business data, not the technology itself.

For CRSTA Business, the minimum is:

• Your website URL (CRSTBL reads what’s there)
• Any menus, catalogs, or price lists you want the agent to reference
• Basic business info (hours, locations, contact)

For CRSTA Enterprise, the onboarding team works with you to organize product catalogs, technical documentation, policies, and any integrations required for the deployment.

No, for CRSTA Business. It’s designed to be operationally simple — most small businesses can deploy it without IT or engineering help.

For CRSTA Enterprise, IT or data teams are often involved because deployments include integrations, multi-location workflows, and internal systems. The CRSTBL team drives most of the technical work; your internal team provides access and validates.

Yes. Business information can be updated any time as menus, prices, services, locations, promotions, or policies change. This matters especially for restaurants, retailers, and multi-location businesses where offerings shift frequently.

Three tiers, matched to how many organizations, locations, and channels you run:

• CRSTA Business — starting at $120/month. Independent businesses and small operating groups: one organization, up to five locations, one website agent. Includes a 14-day trial period.
• CRSTA Network — platform from $1,000/month plus agents. Chains, franchises, and multi-entity operators: up to ten organizations and fifty locations, website and kiosk agents, subdomain support.
• CRSTA Enterprise — platform from $2,500/month plus agents. Large or integrated organizations with custom systems, scope, and scale, set during discovery.

Platform and agent fees are additive on Network and Enterprise. Full details: Business, Network, and Enterprise pricing.

CRSTA Business is the self-serve tier for independent businesses and small operating groups — one organization, up to five locations, one website agent, and a single primary website with no subdomains. Fast to deploy, simple analytics, one Character Identity.

CRSTA Network is the tier designed for multi-location and franchise operators: chains, franchises, and multi-entity groups coordinating many locations under one account. It raises the ceiling to ten organizations and fifty locations, adds kiosk agents alongside website agents, supports up to twenty-five subdomains, and brings unified cross-location analytics, semantic and context mapping, and structured onboarding.

The practical dividing line is whether you run your locations as separate sites or as one operation. If locations need to share a brand voice while reporting into a single view, that is Network.

Worth knowing: a location does not automatically get its own agent. One Network agent can serve several locations through visitor selection, page context, or routing logic.

Above Network, CRSTA Enterprise covers large or integrated organizations with custom systems, scope, and scale, set during discovery. Full details: CRSTA pricing.

Separately from CRSTA, and on a different basis. Cumae is one product with no tiers — price is set by how many locations you publish and how they are structured, not by feature level.

Cumae Publish is free: one self-asserted public identity record with Open access — no domain or entity verification, no monitoring, no partner controls. A paid Cumae Record adds verification, Registered access, and the ability to configure Allowlisted and Private views. Paid records start at $99/mo billed annually for a single location. A group whose locations share the same hours, menu and policies can publish one record listing up to ten addresses for $149/mo. Groups needing each location individually addressable add location records at a per-location rate that falls as the count rises. Hotels and resorts are priced per property by key count. Full tables are on the Cumae pricing page.

CRSTA and Cumae are sold independently — you do not have to buy both, and Cumae plans are never blended with CRSTA conversation allowances.

The CRSTA Business trial period is the first 14 days of your $120/month subscription. Your Conversation Agent is fully live during the trial, and you have access to weekly analytics from day one.

At the end of the trial, you can convert to a paid subscription or cancel — you’re only billed if you continue.

Enterprise does not include a trial period. Enterprise engagements begin with a scoping conversation and structured onboarding under a signed service agreement.

CRSTA Business is month-to-month with no long-term commitment. You can cancel at any time from your account.

CRSTA Enterprise agreements are structured during onboarding to fit the deployment scope, and typically include annual terms given the up-front onboarding investment. The service auto-renews unless canceled by the client. The specific terms are defined in the service agreement.

Yes. Many businesses start on Business and move up as they add locations or organizations, need additional channels, or want cross-location analytics. Network is the usual next step for multi-location and franchise operators; Enterprise follows when scope becomes custom. Your existing configuration and conversation history carry over.

Customer conversation data is stored on secure cloud infrastructure with enterprise-grade encryption in transit and at rest.

Enterprise deployments can specify additional storage requirements, including region-specific storage where required by local regulations. Contact us for the current infrastructure detail sheet.

No. CRSTA conversation data is used to improve your Conversation Agent and to power your analytics. It is not used to train external or general-purpose AI models, and it is not sold or shared with third parties.

CRSTA conversation data and Cumae business information are governed separately, and the answers are different. Cumae is designed to make information you have approved available to external applications under the access policies you configure. See the next question.

Yes — deliberately, and only as you authorize it. That is the point of Cumae: making approved business information available to external AI systems and applications so they describe your business accurately. What is shared, and with whom, is set by the access policy you configure for each part of your record.

Open information is your public identity record and is readable by anyone, including unregistered AI systems and search engines. Registered access to your full general record is available to identified applications that have accepted CRSTBL’s terms. Allowlisted views go only to partners you approve individually. Private information stays with your own company-controlled agents and integrations.

Caching, retention, redistribution and model-training rights for information retrieved by a registered application are governed by that application’s access agreement. Technical access does not create a right to resell, redistribute or train on protected Cumae information. Access to Cumae can be logged — including the application, the record, the scope and the time. CRSTBL may not be able to observe every downstream use after information has been retrieved, which is why downstream use is also governed contractually.

You do. Conversation data generated by your Conversation Agent belongs to your business. You can export it, use it in your own systems, and take it with you if you cancel.

No. CRSTBL runs without requiring PII from your visitors. Intent, analytics, and business insights come from the aggregate patterns in conversations, not from who is asking.

If you want to capture leads, you can optionally offer email capture — but that’s an opt-in, not a requirement.

Industries with information that’s hard to browse but easy to describe. Common fits:

• Restaurants — menu, dietary, hours, reservations
• Retail — product discovery, availability, sizing, comparisons
• Distributors and manufacturers — technical spec discovery, sales enablement
• Professional services — service scoping, booking, policy questions
• Medical, dental, real estate — service and location questions
• Multi-location and franchise operators — consistent conversations across every site

Yes — but CRSTA and Cumae count locations differently, so treat them as separate questions.

CRSTA. Business covers up to five locations under one organization. CRSTA Network — the tier built for chains and franchises — lets each location maintain its own product info, hours, policies and menu variations while sharing a common brand voice via Character Identity, and adds cross-location conversation analytics. One agent can serve several locations through visitor selection, page context, or routing logic, so a location does not automatically require its own agent.

Cumae. Location count is the pricing basis, not a tier limit. You can publish one record listing up to ten addresses where every location shares the same hours, menu and policies, or publish an individually addressable record per location — each with its own hours, Q&A and telemetry — at a per-location rate that falls as the count rises. A CRSTA location limit does not cap the number of Cumae records you can publish.

Yes. CRSTBL supports multilingual conversations, which matters for restaurants, retailers, trade shows, and multi-region businesses.

Yes, optionally. CRSTBL can offer to send a summary, resource, or follow-up by email when the visitor wants a record of the conversation. Lead capture is designed to feel like an offered convenience, not a gate on the conversation.

Yes. CRSTA Business is designed for individual small business locations that want conversational AI without a large technical team, an onboarding project, or an enterprise contract. Sign up, provide your info, and your agent is live within a day. You can add more Business subscriptions as your business grows, or move to Enterprise when you need chain-wide analytics across sites.