My AI Clone isn't responding

First, find which side is broken

One look at the Messages page splits the problem in half: did the customer's message reach IcloneU at all?

1. Open Messages

   Click Messages in the left sidebar. It's the unified inbox of every conversation your Clones have across all connected channels.

2. Search for the contact

   Use the search box above the conversation list to find the customer who isn't getting replies, and open their conversation.

3. Read the verdict

   The inbound message appears but no reply went out — the channel is delivering fine; the problem is usually on the Clone's side. Work through checks 3 to 6 below — and check 7 if the connection's row reads Reconnect required. One exception first: if a workflow handled the message — it matched a workflow's trigger, or answered a workflow that was waiting for a reply, including one your Clone started during the conversation — Messages shows the customer's messages but not what the workflow sent, because workflow replies don't appear there today. Look at your workflows under Automations before blaming the Clone. The inbound message doesn't appear at all — for a direct message, that means IcloneU never stored it: the Connection is switched off (check 1 — its row on Connections reads Disabled), it has no Clone (check 2 — the row reads No Clone), or the channel isn't delivering (check 7).

Check 1 — Is the Connection turned on?

Every Connection has an Enabled toggle, and its own description spells out exactly what "off" means: "When off, incoming messages and comments for this account are ignored. Tokens are kept so you can re-enable without reconnecting." A disabled Connection produces precisely the symptom you're chasing — inbound traffic ignored, no replies — and it's the easiest thing to rule out. It also stores nothing, so while it's off nothing new shows up in Messages. What "ignored" means exactly — and which channels can recover messages that arrived while off — is covered per channel in Assigning a Clone to a platform.

1. Open Connections

   Click Connections in the left sidebar and select the row for the silent channel. Its status tells you at a glance: Disabled means the Connection is switched off.

2. Open the settings panel

   Click the Settings (gear) button in the toolbar. The Account options panel for that Connection opens — the same panel that appears right after you first connect a channel.

3. Check the Enabled toggle

   If Enabled is off, switch it on and click Save. On Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, Save stays greyed out until you also switch on the AI identifier ✨ confirmation — add the identifier to that profile first (Adding the AI identifier). Because the authentication tokens were preserved while it was off, no reconnection or re-authorization is needed — handling resumes for new incoming messages.

Check 2 — Is a Clone attached to the Connection?

A Connection only answers through the Clone attached to it. In the same Account options panel, the Clone dropdown — described as "The clone that will reply on behalf of this integration" — names who that is. The dropdown lists the Clones that exist on your account and has no "none" option, but a Connection can still end up with no Clone attached, and on a Clone-less Connection nothing answers — incoming messages aren't even stored, so they never show up in Messages (only a workflow bound to the Connection can still run, while the Connection is switched on). Connecting a channel attaches your account's oldest Clone automatically, so this happens when your account had no Clone at the time, or when the Connection's Clone was deleted on the Clones page without choosing a replacement (which also switches the Connection off) — the Connections page then shows No Clone.

1. Open the Connection's settings panel

   On Connections, select the silent channel's row and click Settings (gear).

2. Confirm the Clone dropdown has a selection

   Make sure the Clone dropdown actually shows the Clone you expect — not an empty field.

3. Select and Save

   Pick the Clone that should answer on this channel, switch Enabled on if it is off (on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube together with the AI identifier ✨ confirmation), and click Save. New incoming messages will route to it from then on.

Check 3 — Have you run out of units?

Every Clone reply is paid for in units, and when the balance hits zero with Auto top-up off (the default), the Clone stops replying until the next monthly reset or until you buy more. Nothing errors — the Clone simply stops, and because units are account-level, expect the silence to hit every channel at once. IcloneU does warn the account owner first: low-balance notifications arrive through the owner's bell icon in the top bar as the balance approaches zero — teammates don't get them.

1. Open Account settings

   Click your avatar in the top-right corner and choose Account settings.

2. Read the balance on the Billing tab

   Open the Billing sub-tab and look at Plan units remaining. If it reads zero — and your prepaid balance is empty too — you've found the silence.

3. Restore service

   Click + Add units at the top of the Billing tab and buy a one-off top-up — replies resume as soon as the purchase completes. To stop this happening again, consider Auto top-up (off by default) or a bigger plan.

Because units are account-level, a zero balance is the suspect when every channel goes quiet at the same time — that's what distinguishes this cause from the per-Connection ones above. For how units are counted and the three ways to add capacity, see Understanding Clone response limits.

Check 4 — Are replies being held for your authorization?

On comment channels — Facebook, Instagram and YouTube post comments — the Connection's Response authorizations required for section decides which kinds of replies go out on their own. Any category you tick (Answers, Casual greeting, Thanks and so on) is held for your authorization instead of being auto-sent; unticked categories post automatically. A Clone that looks silent on your posts may simply be waiting for you to approve what it wrote.

Two things to know before you blame this check: on post comments the ticked categories always gate. On direct messages — Telegram, WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram DMs — they apply only when the connection's Direct-message review is set to Hold until approved or Auto-send after a delay; with the default, Send immediately, DMs auto-reply as before. So held authorizations can explain a quiet comments section — and, when review is on, a quiet DM inbox too: open the conversation in Messages and approve the held reply from the thread.

Check 5 — Has a human taken the conversation over?

While a team member is handling a conversation, the Clone is paused on that conversation — it stops auto-replying so the human and the AI never talk over each other. If someone took a conversation over and forgot to hand it back, that one thread stays silent even though everything else works.

1. Open the conversation in Messages

   Find the affected conversation and look at its header. "IcloneU is handling this conversation" means the Clone is on duty; "Agent handling" with a team member's name means a human has it and the Clone is paused.

2. Hand it back to the Clone

   Click Return to AI in the header. The Clone resumes answering on that conversation immediately — taking over and handing back are non-destructive and fully reversible.

3. Sweep for forgotten handovers

   Use the conversation-type filter at the top of Messages. All active handovers lists every conversation an agent is handling, whoever holds it, so one person can sweep the whole team's; All pending assignment lists the ones still waiting for an agent, and My active handovers only those handed to you. Tick the forgotten ones and click Return Selected to AI to hand them all back at once. That also releases conversations another agent is holding, which a conversation's own Return to AI button can't do: only the agent handling it sees that button.

Check 6 — Is Knowledge making the Clone refuse?

Sometimes the Clone is replying — but every answer is a variation of "I don't have that info", which from the customer's side feels like silence. That's not an outage; it's the Clone's Knowledge tab doing exactly what it was told. Three settings interact:

• Sources still processing — the Clone can't answer from a source until it has finished processing. On the Knowledge page, a file you upload shows Queued, with its name, in a strip above the library's list, then appears in the list as its own row once it's processed; a single file never gets a status label. A website's row shows Queued and a live count, and can wait at Review Items for you to choose the pages, which aren't processed at all until you click Process (N); it ends on Ready.
• Answer from library only — with this toggle ON, the Clone is forbidden from falling back to general knowledge: when the library has no match, it says "I don't have that info" instead of improvising. Accurate by design, but on a thin library it refuses a lot.
• How closely answers must match — the four-position slider (Loose / Balanced / Strict / Exact) controls how tight a library match must be before the Clone uses it. Strict or Exact on a small library can effectively silence it; Balanced is the default and the right starting point.

The classic version of this trap: two Clones share one library, the support Clone is set to Strict with Answer from library only on, and it "stops working" while its sibling chats happily. Open the silent Clone's Knowledge tab, try Balanced, confirm the library's sources have finished processing — and remember the tab uses explicit save: nothing applies until you click Save changes.

Check 7 — Channel-side faults and escalation

If the Connection is on and has a Clone (checks 1 and 2) and the customer's direct message still never appears in Messages (the step-zero test — post comments never show there by design; they live in Post replies), no setting inside IcloneU will fix it — the channel isn't delivering events to the platform. Broken webhooks and revoked platform permissions produce this shape. An expired authorization can produce either shape: when the channel keeps delivering events, IcloneU deliberately keeps storing the inbound messages — so they still appear in Messages — but stops generating replies and running automations until you reconnect, so no capacity is spent on replies that could never send. Look for Reconnect required on the connection's row in Connections; reconnecting resumes handling automatically. Social media connection issues walks through re-authorizing and repairing each channel.

One channel-family rule worth knowing: on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Instagram DMs, free-form replies are only allowed inside the 24-hour window after the customer's last message — outside it, the Clone can't simply answer, and a reply held for review that outlives the window expires as Undeliverable. The WhatsApp guide covers the window and the template-message way around it.

Frequently asked