Resources Insight
WhatsApp pre-filled message examples: what 12,268 Indian homepages pre-fill, plus 15 rewrites
Half of the Indian homepages that link WhatsApp also put words in the customer's message box. We read all 12,268 of them. One in four carry the untouched default sentence of one hosted website package, one in five say only 'hi', and a few speak in the business's voice by mistake. Here is what the rest say, and 15 pre-fills written the way a customer would write them.
The short version
- In Common Crawl's August 2026 archive, 12,268 of the 24,714 .in homepages with a WhatsApp link (49.6%) pre-fill a message. 3,135 still carry the default sentence in the WhatsApp box of one hosted website package, with the site's own address inside it, and 2,468 pre-fill only 'hi' or 'hello'.
- Of 18,422 pre-filled texts we could read, 71% open with a greeting, 36% state an interest, 21% say where the customer came from, 6% ask to book and under 5% ask a price.
- A good pre-fill names the page, states the intent in the customer's words, leaves the sentence open for them to finish, stays under about 80 characters, and carries no personal data and no price.
- WhatsApp's format is https://wa.me/<number>?text= followed by the URL-encoded sentence. Give each page its own source word and tag chats by it; the pre-fill is the only page-level attribution WhatsApp gives you.
Half of the Indian homepages that link WhatsApp don’t leave the message box empty. They put a sentence in it, and the customer either sends that sentence or deletes it and types “hi”. We wanted to know what those sentences say, so we read every one of them.
The method in two sentences: we took Common Crawl’s August 2026 archive of the public web and read the stored HTML of 113,102 .in homepages, 24,714 of which carried a WhatsApp click-to-chat link. On each link we read the text after ?text=, the sentence WhatsApp drops into the message box when the link is tapped. The full method and every caveat are in our study of WhatsApp on Indian websites.
Of those 24,714 homepages, 12,268 (49.6%) pre-fill a message. 3,135 of them still carry the untouched default sentence of one hosted website package: “Hello! I found your website”, then the site’s own address, then “and am interested in your products”. Another 2,468 pre-fill only “hi” or “hello”. The rest, the majority, say something a customer might say, and the useful half of this article comes from them.
How many websites pre-fill a WhatsApp message?
About half. The figures below are from the raw set of WhatsApp-linking homepages, 24,714 pages, before the parked-page cleaning that takes the flagship’s count to 24,059.
| Measure | .in homepages |
|---|---|
| WhatsApp click-to-chat link on the homepage (raw set) | 24,714 |
Pre-fill a message with ?text= | 12,268 (49.6%) |
| Distinct pre-filled texts across those pages | 14,924 |
| Carry one website package’s untouched default sentence | 3,135 |
| Pre-fill only “hi” or “hello” | 2,468 |
| Pre-filled text contains a URL | 6,434 |
So of the pages that pre-fill anything, about one in four never changed the package’s sentence (3,135 ÷ 12,268 = 25.6%) and about one in five say a bare greeting (2,468 ÷ 12,268 = 20.1%). A few dozen pages belong to betting sites and were excluded from everything that follows.
The package sentence nobody edited
One hosted website package puts a WhatsApp box headed “Raise your Query” on its sites, with a default message that reads “Hello! I found your website <url> and am interested in your products”, and it fills <url> with the page’s own address. On 3,135 homepages that sentence is still there, word for word. 3,112 of them carry the footer credit “Developed & Managed By Weblink.In Pvt. Ltd.”, and none shows plugin or site-builder code. A few variants swap “products” for “properties” or “packages”, which is the package filling in a word from the site’s settings, not a person writing.
The business then receives its own web address, sent back to it in a sentence the customer never typed. To the receptionist it reads like spam; to the customer, who watches it appear when they tap the button, it reads like a form.
Reshma Nadar, an invented example, runs a physiotherapy clinic in Thane with two receptionists on one WhatsApp number. Her website package came with the WhatsApp box in 2024, and nobody changed its sentence. For a year Reshma read “I found your website” in first messages and took it as proof the site was working. It was, but the sentence said nothing about what the patient wanted, so every chat began with a receptionist asking.
The same thing on a smaller scale: a site-builder’s default, “Thanks for visit our website leave your buy requirement for an instant quote”, sits on 12 pages. And 6,434 pre-filled texts contain a URL at all, about half of them the package’s.
The wa.me text parameter, as WhatsApp defines it
WhatsApp’s help page on click to chat gives the format as https://wa.me/whatsappphonenumber?text=urlencodedtext, “where whatsappphonenumber is a full phone number in international format and urlencodedtext is the URL-encoded pre-filled message” (Common Crawl capture of 6 Sep 2026). Its own example is https://wa.me/1XXXXXXXXXX?text=I'm%20interested%20in%20your%20car%20for%20sale: a first-person sentence that names the thing and the intent. For an Indian number the part before ?text= is 91 and the ten digits, with no plus sign, zeros or dashes.
URL-encoded means every space becomes %20, a comma %2C, an apostrophe %27 and a question mark %3F. Leave the spaces in and the link breaks at the first one, which is where part of the “hi” count comes from. The page also describes a text-only link with no number, https://wa.me/?text=..., which asks the tapper to pick a contact; it has no place on a business site.
The customer sees the pre-filled sentence in the box and can edit or delete it before sending. For the HTML of a link and a floating button, see how to add WhatsApp to your website; for the number mistakes we found on the same pages, see WhatsApp link mistakes on Indian websites. Terms like click to chat and the 24-hour window are in the glossary.
What the pre-fills say
Most open with a greeting, a third say “interested”, and only one in five says where the customer came from. The base here is 18,422 page-texts: a page with two differently worded links counts twice. We removed 495 page-texts that a script assembles at tap time and the betting-site texts before counting.
| Pattern in the pre-filled text | Page-texts | Share of 18,422 |
|---|---|---|
| Starts with a greeting (hi, hello, hey, namaste, dear) | 13,119 | 71.2% |
| States an interest (“interested”, “know more”, “information”, “details”, “enquiry”, “query”, “question”) | 6,578 | 35.7% |
| Names where the customer came from (website, Google, Instagram, Facebook, ad, QR, bill, packet) | 3,895 | 21.1% |
| Points at a product, service or page (“about”, “regarding”, “for your”) | 2,048 | 11.1% |
| Polite close (please, kindly, thanks) | 1,760 | 9.6% |
| Asks to book, visit, order, or for a demo or trial | 1,096 | 5.9% |
| Asks for a price, quote, rate or fee | 885 | 4.8% |
| Hinglish or Hindi words | 457 | 2.5% |
| Discount, offer or free | 282 | 1.5% |
| A personal-data slot (name:, phone:, email:) | 45 | 0.2% |
The shape that dominates is “Hello, I am interested in your services”: polite, generic, and no help to the person who reads it. The two things that move a chat forward, a booking or a price, are the rarest. And most of the 21% who name a source say “website”, which the business already knew; a source word only earns its place when the site has more than one page with a button.
The 45 texts with “name:” and “phone:” slots ask the customer to type what arrives with the message anyway: they are already on WhatsApp.
Hinglish, at 2.5%, follows the pages rather than the customers: the pre-fill is written in the website’s language, and the chat that follows often isn’t.
How long they are
Most real pre-fills are one sentence of 9 to 15 words. The one-word bucket is inflated, for a reason worth knowing.
| Length of the pre-filled text | Page-texts |
|---|---|
| 1 word | 4,869 |
| 2-3 words | 1,362 |
| 4-8 words | 3,635 |
| 9-15 words | 7,065 |
| 16-30 words | 1,323 |
| 31+ words | 168 |
The parser reads the text from the link as written in the HTML, and where a site left the spaces unencoded it stops at the first space, as a browser does. So “Hi” on 882 pages, “Hello” on 554 and the fragments “Hi, I” on 358 and “Hi,” on 347 include longer texts cut short, and the customer on those sites sees the cut-short version too. The one-to-three-word buckets are a mix of deliberate greetings and broken links.
The 495 page-texts we set aside are built by a script, with placeholders like ${message} in the HTML. The scan cannot read what those send, and neither can anyone reading the page source.
The most common complete sentences
Normalised to lower case with punctuation removed, these are the sentences that appear on the most pages. The counts are small because 14,924 distinct texts spread across 12,268 pages: almost everyone writes their own.
| Pre-filled sentence (normalised) | Pages |
|---|---|
| hi i contacted you through your website | 16 |
| hello i am interested in your services | 14 |
| hi i got your whatsapp information from your website | 13 |
| hello i need to know more about | 13 |
| hello i want to know more about your services | 11 |
| thanks for contacting us | 11 |
| hi i am interested in your services | 11 |
| hi i need help | 11 |
| hello i have a query | 11 |
| hi i have a question | 10 |
| hi i am interested in your products | 10 |
| hi i have a query | 10 |
| hello i would like to know more about your services | 8 |
| hi i have a question about your products | 7 |
| i am interested for digital visiting card please share me demo | 6 |
| hi mam i have a query please help me | 6 |
| hi i want to book a cab | 5 |
| hi i am looking for stay | 5 |
| hello i would like to book an appointment | 4 |
| hi i am planning tour can you help me | 3 |
One of these is in the wrong voice. “Thanks for contacting us” is a business’s sentence, the one it would send after a message arrives. On 11 pages it has been put into the customer’s box, so the customer taps the button and is made to thank the business for contacting them. Whoever set it up was thinking about the reply, not the message. Everything in that box is spoken by the customer.
The best of the list is “hello i need to know more about”. It stops. The customer finishes it, and the business gets the noun it needs.
What a good pre-fill does
Five things, each the opposite of something common in the table above.
It names the page or placement, with a word you will recognise in an inbox preview. “Courses page”, “menu page”, “listing”: not “website”, which every page shares.
It states the intent in the customer’s words, in the first person, about the thing the page is about. “I’d like to book a consultation”, not “I am interested in your services”.
It leaves the sentence open. An open end gets finished; a closed paragraph gets deleted and replaced with “hi”.
It stays under about 80 characters. That is one line in a phone’s message box and one line in an inbox preview. The 168 texts over 30 words are paragraphs, and paragraphs get deleted.
It carries no personal data and no price. The number arrives with the message, so no “phone:” slot. Prices change and homepages are cached, so a figure in the text becomes a promise you no longer meant.
A note on the bare “hi”: it costs you a reply to ask what the customer wants, so the chat takes two of your messages instead of one. From 1 October 2026 service replies beyond 1,000 per number a month are charged at ₹0.115 per delivered message to an Indian number, before GST (Meta’s pricing page, updated 30 September 2026). The money is small; the minutes and the chats that stall at “hi” are not.
15 pre-fills by industry, rewritten
Each names the page, speaks as the customer and fits in 80 characters. The encoded form is what goes in the link; <number> stands for your WhatsApp Business number in international format. Where a sentence ends mid-way, that is deliberate: the customer finishes it. Change the nouns to yours.
Clinic, appointments page: “Hi, I’d like to book a consultation. I’m on your website.”
https://wa.me/<number>?text=Hi%2C%20I%27d%20like%20to%20book%20a%20consultation.%20I%27m%20on%20your%20website.Coaching institute, courses page: “Hi, I’m on your courses page and want details of the batch starting in”
https://wa.me/<number>?text=Hi%2C%20I%27m%20on%20your%20courses%20page%20and%20want%20details%20of%20the%20batch%20starting%20inBuilder, project page: “Hi, I’m looking at the 2 BHK project on your site. Can I visit this week?”
https://wa.me/<number>?text=Hi%2C%20I%27m%20looking%20at%20the%202%20BHK%20project%20on%20your%20site.%20Can%20I%20visit%20this%20week%3FBoutique, product page: “Hi, I saw a kurta set on your website. Is it available in”
https://wa.me/<number>?text=Hi%2C%20I%20saw%20a%20kurta%20set%20on%20your%20website.%20Is%20it%20available%20inRestaurant, menu page: “Hi, I’m on your menu page and want to order for delivery to”
https://wa.me/<number>?text=Hi%2C%20I%27m%20on%20your%20menu%20page%20and%20want%20to%20order%20for%20delivery%20toSalon, services page: “Hi, I’d like to book a haircut this week. I’m on your website.”
https://wa.me/<number>?text=Hi%2C%20I%27d%20like%20to%20book%20a%20haircut%20this%20week.%20I%27m%20on%20your%20website.Travel agency, package page: “Hi, I’m looking at the Kerala package on your site. Dates for December?”
https://wa.me/<number>?text=Hi%2C%20I%27m%20looking%20at%20the%20Kerala%20package%20on%20your%20site.%20Dates%20for%20December%3FCA firm, services page: “Hi, I need help with GST filing for my business. I’m on your website.”
https://wa.me/<number>?text=Hi%2C%20I%20need%20help%20with%20GST%20filing%20for%20my%20business.%20I%27m%20on%20your%20website.Manufacturer, products page: “Hi, I’m on your products page. Please share the catalogue and minimum order.”
https://wa.me/<number>?text=Hi%2C%20I%27m%20on%20your%20products%20page.%20Please%20share%20the%20catalogue%20and%20minimum%20order.Shopify store, product page: “Hi, I’m on your online store and have a question before I order.”
https://wa.me/<number>?text=Hi%2C%20I%27m%20on%20your%20online%20store%20and%20have%20a%20question%20before%20I%20order.Gym, membership page: “Hi, I’d like to know about membership. I’m on your website.”
https://wa.me/<number>?text=Hi%2C%20I%27d%20like%20to%20know%20about%20membership.%20I%27m%20on%20your%20website.Car service centre, booking page: “Hi, I’d like to book a car service. I’m on your website. My car is a”
https://wa.me/<number>?text=Hi%2C%20I%27d%20like%20to%20book%20a%20car%20service.%20I%27m%20on%20your%20website.%20My%20car%20is%20aReal-estate listing page: “Hi, I’m viewing a listing on your site. Is it still available?”
https://wa.me/<number>?text=Hi%2C%20I%27m%20viewing%20a%20listing%20on%20your%20site.%20Is%20it%20still%20available%3FWedding photographer, portfolio page: “Hi, I saw your wedding portfolio on your site. Are you free on”
https://wa.me/<number>?text=Hi%2C%20I%20saw%20your%20wedding%20portfolio%20on%20your%20site.%20Are%20you%20free%20onNGO, get-involved page: “Hi, I’m on your website and would like to volunteer.”
https://wa.me/<number>?text=Hi%2C%20I%27m%20on%20your%20website%20and%20would%20like%20to%20volunteer.For printed codes on packets, bills and hoardings, the QR code article has a placement table with its own sentences. A single keyword such as CATALOGUE is a pre-fill too, and the lead magnet article covers what should happen in the thirty seconds after it arrives.
Measure it: one source word, one tag
The pre-filled sentence is the only page-level attribution WhatsApp gives you. The chat carries no page URL and no UTM tag; it carries the customer’s number and whatever was in the box. So the measurement is this: give every page or placement its own source word, and when the first message contains that word, tag the contact with it. Count the tags on Monday.
Click-to-WhatsApp ads are the exception. Meta attaches the ad to the chat itself, so the ad’s pre-fill can spend its 80 characters on intent instead of source, and the reply rules in the free window article take over from there. What to ask in the first reply, and who owns the lead by morning, is in WhatsApp lead generation.
- Website visitor: Hi, I'd like to book a consultation. I'm on your website. 7:48 pm
- Nadar Physio, Thane: Hi, glad to help. Which day suits you? Tomorrow we have slots from 10 to 1 and 5 to 8. 7:48 pm
- Tomorrow morning
- Tomorrow evening
- Another day
- Website visitor: Tomorrow evening 7:50 pm
- Tagged: source = website. First reply sent by the journey; the receptionist takes it from here.
Treat the tag count as a floor: some customers delete the text and type “hi”. The ones who leave it in are enough to show which pages bring enquiries.
What this scan cannot tell you
Common Crawl is a very large sample of the public web, not a census of Indian businesses; big, well-linked sites are over-represented and tiny or new ones under-represented. We read homepages only, so a pre-fill on a product or contact page, where the better ones usually live, is not counted, and a site with a different sentence per page shows us only the first.
Counts are of homepages, not companies. The pre-fill figures use the raw set of 24,714 WhatsApp-linking homepages, before the parked-page cleaning the flagship applies; the parser truncates at unencoded spaces and cannot read script-built texts. Everything here describes August 2026. How the buttons got onto the pages, plugin by plugin, is in how Indian websites add the WhatsApp button.
Open your own site on a phone, tap the WhatsApp button and read what is in the box before you send it. If it says “Hello! I found your website” followed by your own address, you are one of the 3,135; to change it, ask whoever manages your site package. Write the sentence a customer on that page would want to send, then stop halfway and let them finish it.
Common questions
What is the wa.me text parameter?
It is the part of a WhatsApp click-to-chat link that pre-fills the message box. WhatsApp's help page gives the format https://wa.me/<number>?text=<message>, where the number is in full international format and the message is URL-encoded, so a space becomes %20 and an apostrophe %27. The customer sees the text in the box and can edit or delete it before sending.
How many websites pre-fill a WhatsApp message?
In our scan of Common Crawl's August 2026 archive, 12,268 of the 24,714 .in homepages with a WhatsApp link (49.6%) pre-filled a message. Among them, 3,135 carried the untouched default sentence of one hosted website package and 2,468 pre-filled only 'hi' or 'hello'. The count is of homepages as crawled in August 2026, not of businesses.
What should a WhatsApp pre-filled message say?
Name the page or placement the customer is on, state what they want in their own words, and leave the sentence open so they finish it. Keep it under about 80 characters, in the first person, with no personal data and no price. For example: 'Hi, I'm on your menu page and want to order for delivery to'.
Why do so many WhatsApp links say 'Hello! I found your website' with the site's address?
It is the default text in the WhatsApp box of one hosted website package, which inserts the site's own URL. Our scan found it, unchanged, on 3,135 Indian homepages, about one in four of the pages that pre-fill anything. Ask whoever manages your site package to replace it with a sentence that names the page and what the customer wants.
Can pre-filled text tell me which page a WhatsApp chat came from?
Roughly, yes. WhatsApp does not pass the page or any UTM tag into the chat, so the only page-level signal is the sentence you pre-fill. Give each page its own source word, such as 'menu page' or 'courses page', and tag chats by that word. Some customers delete the text and type 'hi', so treat the count as a floor.
Sources
- Common Crawl, August 2026 crawl archive (CC-MAIN-2026-34) · Crawled 7–20 Aug 2026; page read 15 Oct 2026
- Common Crawl · Read 15 Oct 2026
- Conecxt scan of Common Crawl CC-MAIN-2026-34, analysis of 15 Oct 2026 · 15 Oct 2026
- How to use click to chat (WhatsApp Help Centre) · Common Crawl capture of 6 Sep 2026
- Pricing on the WhatsApp Business Platform (Meta for Developers) · Updated 30 Sep 2026
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