58 of 59 EU Website Chat Widgets Showed No AI Disclosure Before the Chat Opened

For each website we loaded the home page once, as a first-time visitor sees it, and looked for a chat widget our scanner recognises. Where there was one, we checked whether the page or the widget, as loaded, told visitors they would be talking to an AI. We did not open the chat, type anything or click anything.

The result for each site is one of two things: an AI disclosure was detected at first view, or no AI disclosure was detected by an automated scan. We publish totals only. No website, company or chat provider is named.

If your website has an AI chat widget, Article 50(1) of the AI Act requires that visitors are told they are interacting with an AI system, unless that is obvious from the context. Article 50(5) sets the timing and the manner: the information must be given "in a clear and distinguishable manner at the latest at the time of the first interaction or exposure".

A line in your privacy policy or terms is unlikely to meet that. Put the disclosure where the conversation starts: in the chat launcher or the first message, in the visitor's language. See AI disclosure statement examples for wording you can paste in.

To see what your own home page shows at first view, run the free scan. It uses the same scanner as this study. This page is general information, not legal advice.

• Sites: the most popular websites on the .de .fr .nl .es .it .ie .be .at .pl .se country domains, in rank order from Tranco list GQG5K, a research ranking of top websites. Where the same name appeared on several country domains, we kept only the best-ranked one.
• Sample: sites were scanned in rank order, alternating between countries, aiming for 20 sites with a detected chat widget per country. 59 of the 2,279 sites had a chat widget our scanner could detect.
• Scan: 21–22 October 2026, one site at a time with a pause between sites, using the same automated scanner as our free scan. It identified itself as Article50ResearchBot and followed each site's robots.txt.
• Disclosure check: the scanner looked for text, on the page or in the widget as loaded, telling visitors they are talking to an AI.
• Statistics: percentages are of the 59 sites with a detected chat widget, with a 95% Wilson confidence interval.
• Data: we kept yes/no flags and counts per site, never page content or screenshots, and we delete the per-site records once the study is done.

• Only the home page of each site was checked.
• The chat was never opened. A disclosure shown only after the chat is opened was not counted, so some of the 58 sites may disclose at that point.
• Automated detection can miss disclosure wording, especially unusual phrasing or languages, and can miss chat widgets it doesn't recognise.
• A detected chat widget is not always AI: some are answered by people, and Article 50(1) applies only to AI systems. Where the AI is obvious from context, no separate disclosure is required.
• Top-ranked sites are not representative of all EU websites. Country is taken from the domain ending (.de, .fr and so on), not from where a company is based.
• The sample is small (59 sites), so there is no country breakdown: no group reached 20 sites.
• 862 of the 2,279 sites could not be checked: 436 could not be scanned (blocked, timed out or not a usable page), 33 were excluded by their robots.txt, and 393 were not visited because their robots.txt could not be fetched.

This is a description of what an automated scan saw, not a legal assessment or legal advice.