classifieds – Claz Blog

Over the past few weeks we’ve been working on improving our AI assistant, mostly adding new capabilities and focusing on user experience. Our goal is for the assistant to be able to automate most of our users’ day-to-day tasks and handle most of the customer support inquiries quickly.

What AI assistant can do today

Proactive help. AI assistant will reach out to the user if an important detail is missing from their listing and the assistant cannot figure it out from the image or the description. The assistant will use our internal messaging system and will offer help with populating the missing details on the spot.

Request Assistance. We’ve added “Request Assistance” button to some of the user pages, making it easier for our users to initiate a conversation with the assistant.

Manage listings and profile details in chat. Users are now able to edit most of their listing details in AI assistant chat, including title, description, price, location, category, photos, and category-specific fields like dog breed, bedrooms, dates, and more. Users should be able to upload photos of the listing and the assistant will automatically add them to the listing on request.

Activate, pause, and clean up. Users are also able to activate or pause their listing from the AI assistant chat, delete or restore listings, activate or pause all of their listings at once, or clean up expired listings.

Referring to other listings. AI Assistant should be able to look up information on users’ other listings and start a follow-up conversation for a different listing as needed.

Human backup. If the assistant cannot help, it can now route your request to our support team.

You’re in control. Turn AI assistant on or off under Account / Preferences / AI Assistant. You can also use Disable Assistant in AI assistant chat.

How we made it easier

We did not build a separate chatbot or a new page to learn. The assistant lives in the messaging you already use. When it updates your listing, you see what changed – update notes and a completeness progress indicator. The listing sidebar refreshes automatically. Each conversation focuses on one listing; if you need help with another ad, the assistant opens a follow-up thread. First outreach messages are reviewed before they are sent, and rate limits keep things from getting noisy.

We want your feedback

This is still evolving. If something goes wrong, please tell us – reply in the conversation or use our Contact Us form.

We also want to know whether the assistant helped you, got in the way, or felt unnecessary. Your experience is the best signal we have for what to improve next. Real people read every conversation, and your feedback shapes what we build.

Claz is built for people – someone selling a couch, looking for an apartment, replying to an ad nearby. Lately, a growing share of our traffic hasn’t been people at all. It’s been bots.

Why now

AI and large language models have made large-scale scraping cheap and easy. The result is more automated traffic, often not gentle. That worries us for three reasons:

– Abuse of real users’ data. Listings posted in good faith can be harvested in bulk and reused for scams – fake offers, phishing, impersonation.

– Reliability. A flood of automated requests can slow Claz down for the people actually here to buy and sell.

– Fairness. Scrapers take everything and give nothing back.

What we did

The hard part isn’t blocking traffic – it’s blocking the right traffic, without annoying real users. So, at a high level:

– Smarter traffic limits, so no single source can hammer the site or vacuum pages at machine speed.

– Abuse detection that separates automated harvesting from normal human use.

– Verification only when needed – a quick check shown when traffic looks suspicious, invisible in normal use.

What this means for users

Probably nothing. Browsing, searching, and posting should feel the same. On rare occasions a user might be asked to confirm they’re human – that’s just the system being careful, and it should pass quickly.

Tell us if we got it wrong

We’d rather hear that a measure is in your way than have you quietly leave. If anything slows you down or blocks something legitimate, please tell us – we’ll tune it. Getting this balance right is ongoing work, and your feedback is the best signal we have.

Tag: classifieds

Claz AI assistant – what it can do today