[Python] How to make Telebot respond "I don't understand" when user sends unknown text?

I’m making a Telegram bot using Python and the telebot (pyTelegramBotAPI) library. I created a basic telegram bot for practice, and I want bot to say “Sorry, I don’t understand” when a user sends a message I haven’t defined.

But right now, when the user types something random, the bot just replies with "Hello, user!" (my start message), even though it shouldn’t.

How can I make the bot respond only with the start message on /start, and reply with "I don't understand" for all other unknown texts?

What I’ve tried:

• I added an else block at the bottom of my message handler to catch unknown messages.
• I tried printing message.text to debug it, but still got the /start response.
• I thought maybe /start is being triggered accidentally, but I only call it once in the code.

import telebot
import webbrowser
from telebot import types

bot = telebot.TeleBot('my_token')

@bot.message_handler(commands=['start'])
def welcome(message):
bot.send_message(message.chat.id, f'<em>Hello, {message.from_user.first_name}</em>!', parse_mode='HTML')
markup = types.ReplyKeyboardMarkup()
btn1 = types.KeyboardButton('Open website')
btn2 = types.KeyboardButton('Delete')
btn3 = types.KeyboardButton('Change')
markup.add(btn1)
markup.row(btn2, btn3)
bot.send_message(message.chat.id, "Choose the option:", reply_markup=markup)

@bot.message_handler()
def answers(message):
if message.text == 'Open website':
bot.send_message(message.chat.id, 'The website is open')
elif message.text == 'Delete':
bot.send_message(message.chat.id, 'The message is deleted')
elif message.text == 'Change':
bot.send_message(message.chat.id, 'The message is changed')
elif message.text.lower() == 'id':
bot.reply_to(message, f'ID: {message.from_user.id}')
elif message.text == '/site':
webbrowser.open('https://stackoverflow.com/')
elif message.text == '/help':
bot.send_message(message.chat.id, 'How can I help you?')
elif message.text.lower() == 'bye':
bot.send_message(message.chat.id, f'<em>Bye, {message.from_user.first_name}</em>!', parse_mode='HTML')
elif message.text.lower() == 'hello' or 'hi':
bot.send_message(message.chat.id, f'<em>Hello, {message.from_user.first_name}</em>!', parse_mode='HTML')


bot.polling(non_stop=True)

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