Question 1

What is Frilly?

Accepted Answer

Frilly is the intelligence layer for your brand. We provide two core products that work together: Smart Chat, a conversational AI agent trained on your content that embeds on your website to educate visitors, and Smart Directory, a public directory of businesses, organizations, and individuals optimized for AI discovery. As AI assistants become the primary way people search for local recommendations, Frilly ensures your content is ready to be found, understood, and recommended. We're building a living map of local knowledge where communities can discover what they need through intelligent, conversational interfaces.

Question 2

How does Smart Chat work?

Accepted Answer

Smart Chat is an embeddable AI agent that lives on your website and educates your visitors using your content as its source of truth. You provide the content — upload documents, add website URLs to scrape, or write a description of your business. Our system processes your content using semantic search to understand what you offer. Your Smart Chat widget appears on your website, ready to answer questions about your products, services, hours, and events. Using only your provided content, the AI gives accurate, conversational answers that sound like your brand. Responses cite their sources, the agent won't guess or make things up, and you can customize the tone to match your brand voice.

Question 3

What is the Smart Directory?

Accepted Answer

The Smart Directory at frilly.ai is a public, searchable directory of businesses, organizations, and individual contributors. Think of it as a living map of local knowledge optimized for both human visitors and AI search engines. Every profile includes structured data and machine-readable formats that AI assistants can discover and cite. Instead of keyword matching, you can ask natural questions like "help me find a coworking space." Profiles are designed to be recommended by AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. Traditional SEO ensures visibility in Google and Bing. Creating a profile is completely free, and the more entities join, the more valuable the ecosystem becomes for everyone.

Question 4

What's the difference between SEO and AEO?

Accepted Answer

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) focuses on ranking high in traditional search engines like Google and Bing. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) focuses on being cited and recommended by AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews. Nearly 60% of searches now end without a click. People increasingly ask AI assistants for recommendations rather than clicking through search results. If your content isn't structured for AI discovery, you're invisible to this growing segment. Frilly handles both. Every profile in the Smart Directory includes SEO optimization (title tags, meta descriptions, Schema.org JSON-LD) and AEO optimization (markdown files, JSON files, llms.txt discovery, semantic sitemap). SEO gets you ranked. AEO gets you recommended. You need both.

Question 5

Who should use Frilly?

Accepted Answer

Frilly is designed for businesses, organizations, professional service providers, artists, and makers who want to be discovered through AI-powered search and engage their website visitors intelligently. Ideal for: companies with deep content libraries that go underutilized, and associations with extensive member directories that are difficult to search. Also a great fit for: restaurants, coffee shops, and bars that answer the same questions over and over; retail shops, boutiques, and galleries that have stories behind their products no one ever hears; service providers that lose bookings because visitors can't find what they offer; professional services with deep expertise their website doesn't convey; arts and culture organizations; and nonprofits looking to help visitors understand their mission. If you have a website and want to help visitors understand what you offer through AI-powered conversation, Frilly is for you.

Question 6

How does Frilly make money?

Accepted Answer

Frilly operates on a freemium model. Smart Directory profiles are free because the more entities join, the more valuable the ecosystem becomes for everyone. Revenue comes from Smart Chat subscriptions — Premium and Enterprise tiers that unlock document training, website embedding, and advanced customization. We make money when brands see value in adding an intelligence layer to their websites, not by gating public discovery.

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