Microsoft announced NLWeb, a project that allows you to add AI search to any website

Dmytro Dzhuhalyk - 20 May, 03:12 PM

Microsoft at Build 2025 introduced NLWeb, an open project designed to simplify the implementation of natural language interfaces on websites. This will allow developers to easily turn sites into AI-powered applications. For users, this will mean access to AI search right on site pages.

NLWeb (short for Natural Language Web) is designed to make it easy to add an interface to websites that understands natural human language. This will allow developers to use big language models and their own data to quickly make a website smarter. Microsoft wants NLWeb to be the easiest way to turn any website into an AI application that lets users ask questions about the site’s content in real-world words.

Each NLWeb instance is a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, allowing websites to make their content visible and accessible to AI agents and other MCP ecosystem participants if they choose. Microsoft believes that NLWeb can play a role similar to HTML in the new agent network.

As the company explains, NLWeb uses semi-structured formats like Schema.org, RSS, and others that already publish websites, combining them with AI tools to create natural language interfaces that can be easily used by both humans and AI agents.

The company further notes that their system enhances structured data by incorporating external knowledge from underlying LLMs for a better user experience. NLWeb supports all major operating systems and allows developers to choose the components that best suit their needs. The project also supports all major model and vector databases.

Microsoft is currently working with a small list of early adopters: Chicago Public Media, Common Sense Media, DDM, Eventbrite, Hearst, Inception Labs, Milvus, O'Reilly Media, Qdrant, Shopify, Snowflake, and Tripadvisor. For others interested, the company has released a GitHub repository that contains the code that powers the core natural language query service, connectors to some of the most popular AI models and vector databases, tools for adding your own data in Schema.org, JSONL, RSS, and other formats, and a web server front-end and simple user interface.

For Microsoft, NLWeb is an attempt to bring the benefits of artificial intelligence, which is already actively changing the way users search for information on the Internet, directly to websites.

"Just like the introduction of HTML made it easy for almost anyone to create a website, we want NLWeb to make it easy for any web publisher to create an intelligent, natural language experience for their site. And as the agentic web (and economy) continue to grow, NLWeb will empower web publishers to participate on their terms, ensuring their website is ready to interact, transact and be discovered by other agents if they choose," Microsoft said in a blog post.