Troubleshooting
Most problems come down to five causes — the site is muted, the platform is switched off, the session has expired, the extension predates a change of address, or the business context is thin — and they can be told apart in under a minute. Work down the checklist in order, because the common causes are also the ones that are quickest to rule out.
The button does not appear
Work down this list in order. It is sorted by how often each cause is the answer.
- The site is muted. Open the popup — an active mute is shown there. This is the most common cause by a wide margin. See Muting a site.
- The platform is switched off in your dashboard. Turn it back on.
- You are not signed in. The popup will say so. Open app.reply-pilots.com and sign in.
- You have not clicked into the composer. The button attaches to a comment or message box; it is not a floating toolbar.
- The page loaded before the extension. Reload.
- The extension is disabled. Check
chrome://extensions. A manually loaded extension is disabled if you move or delete its folder. - The platform changed its markup. If everything above checks out and the button is missing on one specific surface, tell us — that is a real bug and we cannot see it from here.
The popup says signed out
The extension's access derives from a web session, and both expire.
- Open app.reply-pilots.com and sign in.
- Reopen the popup — it re-checks when opened.
If it still shows signed out after a successful sign-in, the likely cause is an extension installed
before the move to app.reply-pilots.com. Such a build is pinned to the old address in its manifest
and cannot reach the new one, and an extension cannot rewrite its own permitted addresses.
The fix: remove that copy at chrome://extensions and install Reply Pilots from the
Chrome Web Store instead. The store build is on the current address and updates itself, so
this cannot happen to it again. See Install the extension.
Drafts look generic
Almost always a thin business context rather than a wrong tone setting.
| Check | Fix |
|---|---|
| Would your description fit four competitors? | Replace adjectives with named services and customers |
| Have you written what you decline? | Add it — it is the field that sharpens everything |
| Did you rebuild the brief after editing? | Rebuilding is an explicit step |
| Is your voice set at all? | Add sentence length, formality, and words you never use |
See Set your business context and voice.
The draft repeats what someone already said
Those comments were not on screen when you pressed the button. It reads what is rendered, and does not scroll or expand hidden replies.
Scroll the relevant part of the thread into view, then generate.
The draft invents earlier conversation in a DM
Scroll up so the earlier messages are visible before generating. The co-reply tool is explicitly told that only the visible messages were readable, but if the customer's original question is three screens up, it is not visible.
Generation is unavailable
If AI is not configured on your installation, the drafting tools report that plainly rather than failing with an error. Everything that does not require generation keeps working — you can still use the planner board by hand, browse your library and change settings.
If you are running on your own AI provider key and it has been rejected, the run fails and says so. It deliberately does not fall back to the platform key, because that would spend your credits on a request you asked to run on your own account. Fix or remove the key. See Bring your own AI key.
A planner card will not move
It is overdue, and the overdue lane overrides status. Move it through the lanes rather than editing its status — the move settles the date in the same action. See The content planner.
Generation returned nothing usable
Models occasionally pad or wrap their output in a way that cannot be parsed. The request fails cleanly rather than saving something malformed. Generate again.
Still stuck
Tell us what you were doing, on which site, and what the popup said. Those three facts resolve most reports immediately — and if something is missing from these pages, that is worth knowing too.