Forms

A form lets visitors send you something — a question, a quote request, their email for your newsletter. Forms are built into Max AI Builder: ask for one and it is on your page, protected from spam, and every message lands on your Forms page and in your inbox.

Adding a form

The quickest way is to ask Max in the builder:

Add a contact form to the contact page with name, email, phone, and message.

Max writes the form and places it on the page. You can also start from a template.

Starting from a template

Open Forms from your website's page on the dashboard and choose New form, or open Forms in the Website builder and choose New form from the form picker at the top. A website with no forms yet shows the templates straight away in the Website builder's Forms place, under Start a form.

Each template is a card with a live picture of the form, drawn in your website's colours and fonts, its name, what it is for, and how many fields it has. To find one:

• type in Search templates — "quote" finds Quote request, "news" finds Newsletter;
• or choose a category above the cards, such as Sales or Marketing. All shows every template again. A search and a category work together.

Then choose Use template on the card you want. Type a Name first if you like; leave it empty and the form takes the template's name. Blank is always the last card: Start blank gives you a form with just an email field. The designer opens on your new form, with the template's fields, its look and its thank-you message already in place — ask Max to put it on a page, or paste the form's handle (it looks like @form('contact')) into any page yourself if you edit by hand.

A card whose picture cannot be drawn just now shows a plain panel instead; the template still works the same.

A form you start from a template is yours from that moment: it is a copy, so the changes you make stay on your form, and a template we improve later never changes a form you already have. Like any new form, it emails new messages to your website's contact email until you choose other people on its Settings tab (see Notifications).

Personalising a template with Max

A template's words are general — "Name", "What do you need?", "Thanks! We'll be in touch shortly." Right after you make a form from a template, the Design tab shows Personalise with Max under the form's name. Choose it and Max rewrites the form's words for your business: the questions, the choices, the hints under the questions, the button and the thank-you message. A plumbing business's "What do you need?" becomes "What can we fix?", and its thank-you promises a call back from a plumber.

Max takes your business from your website: the name in Company details, your website's name and its description, and what your pages say you offer and how they speak. The better those describe your business, the better the words fit.

What happens when you choose it:

• the Max panel opens and shows the request it sends for you, with your business details in it, and Max's answer when it is done;
• the form is read-only while Max works on it, exactly as when you ask Max yourself (see While Max is working on a form), and any change you had not saved yet is saved first;
• only the words change. Every question, choice, rule and page stays where it is, and so do who receives the emails, the receipt, spam protection and the form's look. This is not left to Max: while it personalises, anything but a change of words is refused, and your form stays as it was;
• it uses AI credit like any other request to Max.

The button reads Asking Max… while the request is on its way, and waits with Max is working on this form while another update is running. Once Max has started, the button is gone for good. If the request could not start — the form was busy, your last change could not be saved, or your website has used its AI credit — the button stays, so you can try again.

Not what you wanted? Stop puts the form back as it was, and History holds every earlier save. Don't want it at all? Choose the ✕ beside it (Dismiss); it does not come back. You can always ask Max in your own words instead — "make this form sound like a plumber" does the same thing.

The button is offered in the browser where you made the form. On another computer, or after you clear your browser's data, it is not shown — ask Max in the form's Max panel instead.

A form can appear on more than one page. Placing it twice does not create two forms; both places send to the same inbox.

Reading submissions

Forms lists every form on your website with how many messages it has received and how many are new. Open a form to see its inbox: newest first, unread in bold, just like mail. The organization-wide Forms page opens without waiting for every website's inbox to be counted. If a stored count needs refreshing, it briefly says Updating counts while the inbox remains available to open. The first column, ID #, gives each submission a stable reference starting at 1000 for each form. Existing submissions receive numbers oldest first. Deleted numbers are never reused. Each form field has its own column, including hidden values and uploads; long answers are shortened in the table. Open an ID or row to read every answer and download attachments. You can reply by email, mark a message unread, or delete it.

The inbox defaults to Last 30 days, including today, in your site's Settings time zone. Use the date picker for Today, Yesterday, Last 7 days, This month, Last month, All time, or a custom start and end date. Both chosen dates are included. Choose Apply range to use custom dates; Cancel leaves the current range unchanged. Older messages are not deleted when they fall outside the range.

Search by ID, name, email, or an answer. Export CSV exports the current search and date range, including the ID and field columns. Select All time and clear search to export everything. Renamed fields keep their earlier answers; removed/replaced fields are shown as previous fields when the displayed submissions contain them.

Opening a message marks it read. Nothing is ever deleted unless you delete it.

If you ever send yourself a test message from a form, it is kept apart from your real messages: it is not counted, it does not appear in the inbox, and it is left out of the CSV export. A Show tests checkbox appears above the list once a test exists, and ticking it shows those messages — marked Test — and includes them in the export while it is ticked.

How a form looks

A form is drawn to match your website. Its button uses your brand colour — the one on your website's Branding page — so changing that colour changes every form on your website straight away, with nothing to rebuild.

Open the form and choose Theme to change the rest yourself, or ask Max for any of it.

Start with a theme. The gallery at the top shows every theme on a sample form, drawn with your own brand colour, so you can compare them before choosing. Choosing one sets the corners, the spacing, the typeface, the shape of the fields and the button, and where the labels sit. It keeps your colour scheme and any colours you have pinned yourself.

Then change anything you like. Every setting below the gallery can be set on its own — rounder or squarer corners, more or less space between questions, a different typeface, an outlined or a pill-shaped button, labels above or beside each box, and whether the form marks what is required or what is optional. Each one starts on Theme default, which names what your theme gives it, and your own choice wins over the theme until you set it back.

Light, dark, or the visitor's choice. Follow the visitor's setting means the form is light or dark depending on how each visitor has set up their own phone or computer. The page around the form only follows too if your website has dark styling of its own, so check the form on your website page rather than only in the picture beside the settings — that picture draws its own background.

Choosing your own colours

Left alone, a form takes its colours from your website, so changing your brand colour on the Branding page changes every form at once. Pin colours stops that for the colours you choose, and only those: pin the button and everything else keeps following.

Each empty box says what that colour does today, and they are not all the same. Only the button colour follows your brand. The button's label follows it too — unless you pin the button colour, in which case the label is chosen to read on the colour you picked. The background and the text are the page's own in a light form, and built-in ones in a dark form. The outline around each field is made from the text colour, and the error colour is built in.

Two things the platform will not do, on purpose:

• Colours that cannot be read. If a colour you pin would leave the words too faint against what is behind them, the form is not saved and the reason appears under that colour, with the measurement. Forms are often filled in on a phone, outdoors, by someone in a hurry, and a form nobody can read is a form nobody sends. Pick a stronger colour and it saves.
• Hiding the labels. A design with no visible labels can put the label inside the box instead (it lifts out of the way as you type), but every question keeps a label for people using a screen reader. Where a visitor's browser cannot lift the label, it simply sits above the box.

You may also see a note rather than a refusal. That means the colour that reads poorly is one your form takes from your website, not one it pins — so the place to change it is the Branding page, which says the same thing beside your brand colour. It is a note and not a refusal because your brand is yours to choose.

Starting over. Reset to the built-in look clears the theme, every setting and every pinned colour in one step. You can undo it, and the form's History keeps the older versions.

If your website already has its own styling for forms — most websites built before this, and any website copied from an existing one — that styling stays in charge, and some of these settings may not show until it is removed. Max will tell you when that is what is happening.

Changing a form

Designing a form happens in the Website builder, beside the website it belongs to. Open the Website builder and choose Forms in the left rail, or press Design on a form's page under the website's Forms tab. The designer opens over the Website builder rather than taking you away from it, so everything else you had open is still there when you close it.

The form you are working on is named at the top; the picker beside it swaps to another one. Down the left are the form's sections — Design is the one you start in. Submissions takes you to the inbox, History lists every save of the form and can put an earlier one back, Logic holds the form's rules and endings, Theme its look, and Settings is a place for work that arrives in a later release.

• Ask Max — press Max at the top right and say what you want: "add a phone field", "make the message optional", "change the button to Get in touch". The form updates as Max works, a change at a time, so you can watch it happen. Max knows which section you have open, so on Logic "only ask for the policy number when they are insured" becomes a rule, and on Theme "make it rounder and dark" changes the look. Max changes only what you ask about and leaves the rest of the form as it was.
• Stop — while Max is working, the send button becomes a stop button, and the banner above the form carries one too. Pressing it stops Max for real and puts the form back the way it was; Stopping Max, below, says what you see while that happens.
• Edit by hand — the canvas lists the form's fields in the order a visitor meets them. Click a field's name to rename it where it sits. Click the row to open the panel on the right, which holds everything that field has: its type, whether it is required, its help text, its placeholder, how much of a row it takes, and — for a Radio, a Select or a Checkbox List — the choices it offers. Each row's ⋯ menu moves it up or down, duplicates it or deletes it. Add field at the bottom opens the full list of field types, grouped and searchable; the + between two rows adds one in that exact place.
• A field's key settles once the form has been used. Under Advanced in the panel is the field's key — email, phone_number — which is the column heading in the spreadsheet you download, the name inside every message already stored, and what you put in a page address to fill the field in advance. Until your form receives its first message you can change it freely, and the designer tells you at once if the one you typed is already taken or is not a shape we can store. After the first message it becomes read-only and says since when, so that a message you received last month and one you receive tomorrow still line up in the same column. Everything a visitor reads stays editable whenever you like: the label, the help text, the placeholder, the order, whether the field is required, or the field itself.
• After submit — click the form's button on the canvas. Show a thank-you message is the default: on the website the form is replaced by your message, filling the same space with a tick so the page keeps its shape. Send visitors to a page takes them somewhere else instead — a page on your site, like /thank-you, or a full https:// address. The message is saved and you are notified first, and only then are they sent on; a message with a mistake in it shows the errors on the form and stays put. Until you enter a destination, visitors see the thank-you message.

An on-site page selected as a form's thank-you destination defaults to Unlisted. Anyone with its address can still open it, but search engines are told not to include it in results. You can override that choice from the page's settings.

Saying something, rather than asking something

Not everything on a form is a question. Two of the entries under Add field are grouped as Layout, and neither one ever appears in your inbox or your spreadsheet:

• Content — a paragraph, a heading, a short list, a link or a picture, wherever you want it in the form. Useful above a group of questions ("We answer within one working day; please have your booking reference to hand"), or at the end for the small print. Write it in the panel on the right. A few marks give it shape: **bold**, *italic*, - at the start of a line for a bullet, # for a heading, and [the words](https://example.com) for a link. For a picture, use ![what it shows](/images/team.jpg) with the address of a picture already on your website — and always say what it shows, because that is what somebody using a screen reader hears in its place.
• Section Divider — a line across the form, with an optional title over it, for breaking a long form into parts a visitor can see the shape of: "Your details", then "Your project".
• Page — the same idea, taken further: everything after it is on the NEXT page of the form. See Breaking a long form into pages below.

All three are just as easy to reorder, duplicate or remove as any field, and you can ask Max for any of them. Max adds pages only when you ask for them.

Breaking a long form into pages

A form of twenty questions on one screen is a form most people close. Add a Page from the Add field list and everything below it becomes the second page; add another and you have a third. A visitor sees one page at a time, with Continue to go on and Back to return.

• The bar on the canvas is the break. It shows the number of the page it opens, and you can type the heading a visitor will read straight onto it. The sentence under that heading is in the panel on the right.
• Moving a question between pages is just moving the question. Drag it above or below a bar, or use Move up and Move down — there is nothing else to keep in step.
• A page is checked before a visitor may leave it. Anything required and unanswered is marked where it is, and the form stays where it is.
• Nothing is lost by going Back, and pressing Enter in a single-line box is the same as pressing Continue. On the last page, Enter sends the form.
• A break above your first question leaves an empty first page. If a visitor sees a page with nothing on it but Continue, move the bar below the first question.
• A form may have up to ten pages.

Your inbox does not change: a submission arrives as one message with every answer in it, whichever page each answer was on.

A form can also show a progress indicator — a bar, or one mark per page. Select the send button on the canvas and choose one under Pages and answers. Whether or not one is drawn, somebody using a screen reader is always told "Step 2 of 4" as they move, because that is not decoration.

One question per screen

Some forms read better as a conversation than as a page of boxes. Select the send button on the canvas, find How visitors answer under Pages and answers, and choose One question per screen. The form is then met one question at a time.

• Enter moves on, and so does the OK button. A visitor types an answer and presses Enter; on the last screen, Enter sends the form.
• Shift+Enter goes back, and so does the Back button. Going back is never checked, so nobody is held by a question they have not answered yet.
• Inside a large text box, Enter is a new line, as it always is. There a visitor moves on with the OK button below, which the Tab key reaches.
• A small counter — "2 → 6" — says where a visitor is, and somebody using a screen reader is told "Step 2 of 6" as they move. A progress bar or one mark per step still works beside it if you have chosen one; in this mode a step is a question rather than a page.
• Page breaks become the titles between sections. The heading and the sentence under it are a screen of their own — a visitor reads it and presses Enter — and the heading then stays above the questions of that section.
• A note or a divider is a screen too, read and passed the same way.
• A question a rule has taken away is simply not one of the screens, and the counter says so.
• The animation between screens is only for visitors who want one. Anybody whose phone or computer is set to reduce motion is moved between screens with no movement at all.

Everything else about the form is unchanged: the same questions, the same rules, the same review page, the same save-and-continue, and the same single message in your inbox.

A last page that shows a visitor what they wrote

Turn on Review page under Pages and answers — select the send button on the canvas to find it — and your form gains one more page at the end. It lists every question the visitor answered with their answer beside it, and an Edit link that takes them back to that question with the cursor already in it. The send button moves to this page, so nobody sends a form without seeing it first.

• Only answered questions are listed. A question somebody skipped is not shown as blank.
• A choice is shown as the words a visitor chose, not as whatever you stored behind it.
• An uploaded file is shown by its name, and a signature only as "Signed" — the picture itself is not spelled out on a page.
• You can turn it on for a form of one page too. The questions are the first page and the review is the second.
• In one question per screen it is the last screen, and Send is on it, exactly as it is the last page of a paged form.
• The review page does not count towards the ten-page limit.

Letting somebody finish later

Turn on Save and continue later and a visitor's answers are kept in their own browser as they type. If they close the tab, lose the connection or simply come back tomorrow, the form opens with everything they had already filled in and a line at the top saying so, next to a Start over button for anyone who wants a blank form instead.

It is on by default for a form with more than one page, and off for a form of one page — long forms are the ones people leave and come back to. You can change either. Choosing One question per screen does not change that default: it follows the page breaks, as it always has.

A visitor who comes back to a form met one question at a time starts at the first question with their answers already in place. What is kept is the answers, never the place they had reached.

What this is not is as important as what it is:

• Nothing reaches you, or us, until the visitor presses send. The answers never leave their browser. You cannot see a half-filled form and neither can we.
• It is that browser, and only that browser. Somebody who starts on their phone and opens the form on a laptop starts again there. There is no link to email them.
• Files, signatures and anything they agreed to are never kept. A file cannot be put back by a browser at all, and an agreement is to the wording that was on the screen — so those are asked for again.
• Answers are kept for 30 days, then thrown away.
• Editing the form starts everybody fresh. A half-filled form belongs to the version of the form it was given for, so once you change the questions the old answers are dropped rather than put into the wrong boxes.

Asking only what you need to

A form can decide what to show as it is being filled in. "When Are you insured with us? is on, ask for the policy number"; "when What happened? is Theft, ask for the crime reference"; "when they are not a customer, end the form politely rather than asking them three more questions".

The Logic tab is where you write those rules.

Writing a rule. Open a form in the builder, choose Logic on the left, and press Add a rule. A rule reads as one sentence, and the tab shows you that sentence as you build it:

When Service is Repair, show How urgent is it?

The If half is the question to watch, how to compare its answer, and what to compare it with. The list of comparisons changes with the question: a short-text field offers "contains" and "starts with", a number offers "is more than" and "is at least", a date offers "is before", a set of choices offers "is one of", and a tick box offers "is checked". You never have to remember which — the tab only offers what that question can answer.

Press Add condition to watch a second answer as well, and choose whether all of these or any of these has to be true.

The Then half is what happens. A rule can show or hide a question or a whole page, make a question required or optional, skip forward to a later page, finish the form with one of your endings, fill in an answer, or send the notification somewhere else. A tick box is the one answer the tab does not fill in — see below.

A rule starts working the moment it is complete — one thing to watch and one thing to do. Until then the card says Not added yet, and nothing on your live form has changed. The same is true while you are part way through changing a rule you had already written: your form keeps working the way it did until the change is finished.

Endings. Underneath the rules is the list of endings — what a visitor sees after they send the form. Each one is a message of your own, or a page to send them to. The first in the list is the default ending, the one everybody gets unless a rule chooses another; and when two rules both choose an ending, the one higher in the list wins. So the order here decides, never the order of the rules. Move an ending with the grip, or with the up and down buttons beside it. A form always keeps at least one ending.

Starting from a question. On the canvas, a field's menu has Add a condition, and so does the panel beside it. Either one opens the Logic tab with a new rule already asking about that question, so you only have to say what should happen.

When something cannot work. Some rule sets have no answer — a rule that depends on an answer it hides, two rules filling in the same box with different values, a rule that would send the notification to more than five addresses. The form is not saved, and the reason appears on the part of the rule it is about rather than as a message you have to go and find. Fix it and the form saves itself.

Some things are legal and still worth a look. Two rules that show and hide the same question, a rule that asks about a question another rule can hide: those get a Warning badge on the rules that take part. The form works; the badge is there because the customer usually meant something slightly different.

Deleting. Deleting a question, one of its choices, a page break or an ending that a rule refers to asks you first, names the rules involved, and then removes the reference for you. A rule left with nothing to watch, or nothing to do, is deleted with it and the confirmation says so.

What is true of every rule, whoever wrote it:

• A question the rules hide is not asked and not answered. It is not on the screen, a keyboard cannot reach it, and nothing about it reaches your inbox — even if somebody goes out of their way to put it back with their browser's developer tools. Your inbox shows only what the form actually asked.
• A question can be made required as it appears, so a question that only matters sometimes is only compulsory then. The mark beside the question follows the rule — a question a rule makes compulsory shows the required mark while the rule holds, and one a rule releases loses it — so what a visitor is told is always what the form will actually insist on.
• A whole page can be skipped, and the "Step 2 of 4" a visitor sees counts only the pages they will really see.
• A form can end early, with a message of its own — which is how you say "we cannot help with that" kindly instead of asking somebody to fill in two more pages first.
• A rule can send the notification somewhere else. A claim to the claims desk, everything else to the office. Up to five addresses, as with any notification.
• A tick box is ticked by the visitor. In the Logic tab a rule can show, hide or require a tick-box question — a checkbox, a switch or a Consent / Terms box — but it cannot tick it for the visitor. A consent box is never ticked by a rule at all, whoever writes the rule: it records the visitor's own agreement to the exact wording on the page, and an agreement somebody else ticked would not be theirs. A form with such a rule is not saved, and the reason appears on the rule.
• Your inbox says what happened. Open a submission and it names the ending that visitor reached, where the notification went, and how many questions were not asked.

Max writes rules too, and they are the same rules: anything Max writes appears in this tab, and anything you write here is there the next time you ask Max about the form.

Field types that say "coming soon"

Some entries in the Add field list are greyed out with a Soon label, and hovering one tells you what it is waiting for. Appointment and Payment are the two you will see today.

They are shown rather than hidden on purpose: we would rather you knew a thing is coming than wondered whether this is a product that can never do it. A greyed-out entry cannot be added, and a form cannot be made to use one by any other route either.

In the meantime, a booking form asks for a preferred date and time with the Date and Time fields and your business confirms it, and an order form collects what somebody wants so you can invoice them.

Putting the fields in order

The order on the canvas is the order a visitor meets the fields, and you can change it in whichever way suits you:

• Drag it. Take hold of the grip at the left of a row and move the row where you want it. The same grip appears beside each choice in a Radio, Select or Checkbox List, so the answers can be reordered too.
• Use the menu. Each row's ⋯ menu has Move up and Move down; each choice has a small up and down arrow. Nothing has to be dragged.
• Use the keyboard. Move to a grip with the Tab key and press Space to pick the row up. The up and down arrows move it, Space puts it down, and Escape leaves it where it was. Alt with the up or down arrow on a selected row does the same thing in one press.

Every move is announced for screen readers by name and position — "Phone moved to position 3 of 6" — and each one saves itself a moment later, like every other change you make here.

To add a field in a particular place rather than at the end, drag it straight out of the Add field list and drop it between two rows, or press the + that appears between them.

If you have asked your computer for reduced motion, rows move without the sliding animation.

Removing a field, or one of its choices

Both are confirmed first, because both are visible to visitors the moment they save, and because a choice you remove no longer matches the answers people have already given with it. The message names what you are removing and what it costs; answers already received stay readable in your inbox either way. A field you added a moment ago and have not saved yet is simply dropped — there is nothing to confirm.

A form always keeps at least one field.

Changing it in two places at once

Every change saves on its own, a moment after you stop. If the form changed somewhere else while you were working — you have it open in another tab, or Max edited it — the designer tells you what changed and puts the newer version on screen rather than writing over it. Your own unsaved edit is never thrown away silently: if a save is refused, what you typed stays where it is with the reason beside it.

Saved changes are on your dev site straight away. Your live domain shows them after you publish.

Field types, named as the palette names them: Short text, Long text, Email, Phone Number, Number, Date, Time, Multi Select, Radio, Select, Checkbox, Toggle, Toggle Buttons, Checkbox List, Hidden, File Upload, Currency, Link, Address, Tags Input, Formatted text, Color Picker, Consent / Terms, Repeatable Items and Signature — and two blocks that ask nothing, Content and Section Divider. A type that is on its way is listed too, greyed out and marked as coming soon, so you can see what the form will be able to do. Uploads (PDFs, images, documents — up to 10 MB each, five per message) are kept with the submission and download from the inbox.

What the newer ones ask for:

• Time takes a time of day. You can set the earliest and latest you accept, and how far apart the times offered are — every quarter of an hour, say. A window that ends before it starts is read as a window that runs through the night: 22:00 to 06:00 is "any time overnight", not a mistake.

• Toggle is one switch, on or off, with your own words beside it — "Yes" and "No", "Now" and "Later". Make it required and it has to be switched on, which is how you ask somebody to agree to something.

• Toggle Buttons is one answer out of a few, drawn as a row of buttons instead of a list. Best for two to four short answers; use Radio when there are more, or when the wording is long.

• Multi Select takes several answers from a list. The visitor sees the ones they have picked as small chips they can remove, and can search the list by typing when you turn Let the visitor search on — which is worth doing past about ten choices. You can cap how many they may pick.

• Color Picker takes a colour. The visitor gets a swatch to click and a box to type a hex value like #3366ff into, whichever they prefer.

• Checkbox List now takes a smallest and a largest number of ticks — "choose two or three" — and says so if the visitor picks too few or too many.

• Select has the same Let the visitor search switch as Multi Select, which turns a long dropdown into something you can type into.

• Formatted text is for an answer that needs shape to it — a brief, a description, a story. The visitor can make words bold or italic, write headings and lists, and add links. Pick how they write it with Editor style: Buttons gives them a writing area with a small toolbar, and Markdown with a preview gives them the plain text with the toolbar and a live preview underneath. Both accept up to 20 000 characters, and both give you the same answer — only the way it is typed differs.

  What arrives is safe to read. Formatting is kept, links are kept when they start with https:// or mailto:, and everything else a visitor might paste — page code, scripts, images from somewhere else on the internet — is shown as the plain words it is, in your inbox and in the email we send you. Nothing a stranger writes into one of your forms can run, load or track anything. The spreadsheet export keeps the answer as plain text, marks and all, so **urgent** in a cell means the word was bold.

• Currency takes an amount of money. The symbol sits beside the box, and the currency is your website's own unless you name one on the field — so a business in Japan asks for yen without changing anything. You can set the smallest and largest amounts you accept; write them in quotation marks, like "12.50", so they stay exact to the penny. An amount with more decimal places than the money has is not accepted rather than quietly rounded.

• Address asks for a whole address at once: street, an optional second line, city, region, postal code and country. Choose the United States and it rearranges itself the way an American address is written — City, State and ZIP on one line, with the state picked from a list — and it checks the state and the ZIP for you. You can limit which countries are offered, and choose which one the form starts on. Every part gets its own column in the inbox and in the spreadsheet, so you can sort by city or by postal code.

• Tags Input lets the visitor type their own short answers, one after another, and shows each one as a chip they can remove. Offer suggestions if you like — they are only suggestions, and the visitor can always type something you did not think of. You can cap how many tags and how long each one may be. A word still being typed becomes a chip when the visitor presses Enter, and also when they tab or click away from the field, so an answer they did not finish confirming is never quietly lost.

• Consent / Terms is a single box that has to be ticked, beside the exact wording being agreed to, with an optional link to the full terms. It is required unless you say otherwise. What is recorded is not only "yes": the submission keeps a fingerprint of the wording that was on the page, so months later you can tell which version of your terms somebody agreed to. If you change the wording while a visitor has the page open, they are asked to reload rather than having their agreement recorded against words they never read. You can write the wording with bold, italics and a link, as one sentence or one paragraph; anything longer belongs behind the link, and wording that is longer is shown as you typed it.

• Repeatable Items asks the same short set of questions as many times as the visitor needs — three passengers, two vehicles, five line items. You choose the questions each item asks, how few items the form starts with, how many a visitor may add (up to 20), and what the Add button says. In the inbox the column shows how many items came in, and opening the message shows them as a small table; the spreadsheet keeps the count.

  A repeatable group holds the ordinary answers: short and long text, email, phone, number, date, time, a dropdown, a link, an amount of money and a single checkbox. It cannot hold another repeatable group, an upload, a signature, a colour picker, or a field that is a group of its own (radio buttons, a checkbox list, an address, a consent box) — those go beside the group rather than inside it.

• Signature takes a signature two ways, and both are real answers: draw one with a finger, a mouse or a stylus, or type your name in the box below. The typed box is always there — nobody has to be able to draw to send the form. A drawing is kept as a small picture (a PNG, up to 200 KB), and the inbox and the notification email both SHOW it beside the name.

Seeing the form as a visitor sees it

Press Preview at the top of the designer. The workspace splits: your fields on one side, and on the other the real form — the same wording, the same colours, the same typeface, the same checks — drawn again about a fifth of a second after each change you make.

It is a real form, so you can fill it in. What you type stays where it is while you keep editing: rename a field and the answers you have already given are still there. Nothing you type in the preview is sent anywhere unless you ask for it (see below), and the preview cannot post to your website by accident.

Two controls sit above it:

• the desktop and phone buttons show the form at each width, so you can see how it folds on a small screen;
• On the page appears when a page of your website places this form, and swaps the bare form for that whole page, so you can see it where your visitors will meet it. Your changes are saved first, because the page is built from what is saved.

Sending yourself a test

Send a test is how you check that a form really works — end to end, including the email.

Press it, fill the form in the preview, and press the form's own send button. Your changes are saved first, so what you are testing is what your visitors would get.

What happens then is exactly what happens for a visitor, with one difference: the submission is marked as a test.

• It is stored, and you can open it from the message the preview shows, or find it later in the inbox by ticking Show tests.
• The notification email is really sent, to the people the form notifies, with [Test] in front of the subject.
• If the form sends an auto-reply, that is really sent too, to whatever address you typed in, also marked [Test]. Use your own address unless you mean to email somebody.
• It counts for nothing: not in the form's total, not in the unread badge, not against the form's daily limit, and it never counts as a repeat of a real message that follows it.

You can send ten tests of one form an hour. A paused form cannot be tested — resume it first, since a paused form shows visitors a notice instead of a form. And if your form sends visitors to another page after they send it, the preview tells you where they would go instead of taking you there.

Showing Max what you mean

The paperclip beside Max's message box attaches photos and documents, as in the website's own chat — a photo of a paper form you want copied, say. You can also drag files anywhere over the form while Max's panel is open and drop them when Add anything appears. The same file types and limits apply: up to five files, images up to 50 MB and documents up to 20 MB.

While Max is working on a form

The form is read-only while Max has it, and a line above it says so. That is deliberate: if you both wrote at once you would lose each other's work, and your sentence would vanish the moment the form caught up with Max. Your fields appear one at a time as Max adds them, and the form is yours again as soon as the update has finished and been read back.

If you ask Max for something while you have an unsaved change, the change is saved first. If it cannot be saved — a key another field already uses, say — the message is not sent and the reason is shown, because Max would otherwise be answering about a version of the form that was never stored. What you typed stays in the box.

Stopping Max

Stop ends the update, and the form goes back the way it was before it started — Max does not leave you half of a change you did not want. Usually that happens while you are still looking at the screen. If your website is busy with something else, putting the form back is queued and the form says Putting the form back until it lands.

Very occasionally there is no answer. After two minutes the form says so honestly rather than guessing, and offers Keep this version: choosing it keeps what is on screen and stops anything putting it back. Nothing is lost either way — History, on the left, holds every earlier save of the form and can restore any of them.

Undoing your own changes

Press Cmd+Z (Ctrl+Z on Windows) to take back what you have done in this sitting, and Shift+Cmd+Z to put it forward again. Typing a label counts as one change rather than one per letter, and a deletion you confirmed can be taken back the same way.

Undoing something that would remove a field the form has already saved asks you first, just as deleting it would — it is the same removal. Saying no leaves the step where it is, so you can still take it later.

For anything older than this sitting, use History.

Notifications

Open the form's Settings tab to choose who gets emailed:

• To — primary recipients receives the notification.
• CC — visible copies adds people whose addresses other recipients can see.
• BCC — private copies adds people without showing their addresses to others.

Type an address and press Enter or comma to turn it into a removable email bubble. You can also paste several addresses separated by commas or new lines. Each group accepts up to five addresses. Choose Save changes to save your changes; an address still being typed is included if valid. Invalid addresses stay editable with an explanation beside the field.

Leaving To empty uses your website's contact email from Company details, then your organization's billing contact if the site has none — the To field shows which address that is. Adding any address to To replaces that default, so if your contact email should still get the emails, keep it in To as well. CC and BCC never replace it. Removing every address from To brings the default back; turn Internal notification off to stop the emails instead.

When you ask Max to also send submissions to someone, Max keeps everyone who receives them today, adds the new address, and tells you who receives them now. Say instead or only when you want the new address to replace them. If an addition would take a list past five addresses, Max asks which one to leave out.

An address entered in BCC stays private even if it also appears in To or CC. The internal notification includes the submitted answers, links directly to that form's submissions inbox, and replies to the visitor when an address was collected. The inbox link continues to work if you rename the form's handle after publishing. Turn Internal notification off if you would rather just check the inbox.

User receipt

Turn on User receipt to send the visitor a separate confirmation email. This is off by default and works independently of your team's notification. After you turn it on, choose which Email form field contains the visitor's address; the first Email field is initially selected. It uses what the visitor submits in that field, not their logged-in account or your contact email.

The receipt confirms the form and website name, submission time, and reference number. It does not include answers, attachments, dashboard links, or your notification recipients. An empty optional Email field sends no receipt. Removing the selected field or changing its type in the designer turns receipts off; renaming or reordering it keeps the selection.

Changes appear on your dev site immediately and on your live domain after you publish. Repeated receipts to the same address are limited to protect visitors from unwanted email; submissions still arrive in your inbox.

Internal notification subject

The default email subject identifies the form, the domain where it was submitted, its submission date and time in your site's time zone, and its unique submission ID:

The Contact form on example.com has been submitted on September 3, 2026 at 2:30 PM EDT (01K40P3B4H3M1D8NQ2Y7T6C5VA)

Submissions from a dev site name that dev address. The ID identifies the individual submission, not the form, so you can distinguish messages even when they arrive together. An administrator may customize the notification template.

Spam

Forms are protected without a captcha. A form only accepts messages sent from your own website — a copy pasted onto someone else's site does nothing. Each submission carries a short-lived key issued when your page loads, so scripts that skip the page are refused. On top of that: hidden traps only automated senders fill in, a check that the form was not submitted faster than a person could type, limits on how much one visitor (and the whole form) can send, repeated identical messages ignored, and strict checking of every field against what the form actually asks for. Anything that fails is dropped quietly, so a real visitor never sees a puzzle.

If a form starts receiving junk, open Settings, turn on Turnstile spam protection, and choose Save changes. This adds a verification check before visitors can send. Your dev site updates on save; publish to update the live site. The builder's preview does not run verification or send submissions.

Visitors see whether verification is ready. If a check expires or a submission needs a correction, it refreshes without clearing their answers. If verification cannot be completed, the message is not sent; visitors can retry. If the toggle is unavailable, ask your administrator to finish setup. They must also allow your live domain for verification.

You can also pause a form there: visitors see a short notice in its place, and nothing already received is lost.

If part of a form does not load

A form needs a small piece of code from Max AI Builder to send what a visitor types. It is loaded once, kept in the visitor's browser, and is normally invisible. Very occasionally — a dropped connection, a network that blocks outside files — a piece does not arrive. When that happens the form says so plainly instead of pretending to work: the send button is switched off and a line appears reading "Part of this form could not load", with a Try again button. Choosing it fetches the missing piece and, when it arrives, the form goes back to normal with everything the visitor typed still in place.

A visitor is never left with a form that looks ready and then silently refuses to send, and no submission is lost this way — nothing was sent.

Where submissions are kept

Submissions are your data. They are stored with your website, separately from your pages, and they stay even if you rename or delete the form — a deleted form still appears on the Forms page, marked as deleted, for as long as it has history, and a new form with the same name starts its own inbox. Export them any time.

Settings

The Settings tab holds the form's name, its handle, notification addresses, whether it is accepting submissions, the verification step, and the pages it is placed on. Renaming the handle updates every page that uses it. Deleting a form removes it from your website but keeps its submissions.