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.
Updated October 5, 2026. Free to cite with attribution (CC BY 4.0). Completed months only.
| Month | After hours | On a phone | Became a lead | Top topics |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| September 2026 | 48.8% | 56.1% | 12.0% | product 39%, support 20%, shipping 16% |
| August 2026 | 41.4% | 57.2% | 12.0% | product 43%, support 15%, pricing 14% |
| July 2026 | 42.7% | 60.7% | 17.2% | product 40%, other 15%, lead 11% |
| June 2026 | 40.8% | 35.4% | 24.6% | other 41%, product 29%, lead 9% |
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.
To cite: "Chatonbo Chat Index, September 2026, chatonbo.com/research/chat-index". The underlying report with full tables and methodology is The State of Ecommerce Chat 2026.