Microsoft NLWeb Open Project for AI-Powered Natural Language Interface for Websites Unveiled

With Microsoft’s NLWeb, users will be able to ask queries about websites in natural language and receive responses.

Written by Akash Dutta, Edited by Siddharth Suvarna | Updated: 20 May 2025 17:46 IST

Microsoft NLWeb Open Project for AI-Powered Natural Language Interface for Websites Unveiled

Photo Credit: Microsoft

NLWeb was developed by RV Guha, Microsoft’s CVP and Technical Fellow

Highlights

NLWeb is short for Natural Language Web
Microsoft says every NLWeb instance will act as an MCP server
NLWeb is technology agnostic and supports all major operating systems

Microsoft introduced a new open project dubbed NLWeb at its Build 2025 conference on Monday. Short for Natural Language Web, the NLWeb project aims to build an interface to websites that support artificial intelligence (AI) models. With AI capabilities, these websites will then support natural language queries by users and provide answers for those queries. The Redmond-based tech giant says that NLWeb could have a similar effect in building AI-enabled websites, like the introduction of HTML did for website creation.

Microsoft Says NLWeb Will Turn Websites Into AI Apps

In a newsroom post, the tech giant announced its new open project dubbed NLWeb. The technology is Microsoft's vision for future websites, where every web page comes with AI capabilities to handle natural language queries. Essentially, this system will replace traditional search boxes on websites with an AI-powered chatbot interface.

Introducing the project, the company said NLWeb is “the fastest and easiest way to effectively turn your website into an AI app, allowing users to query the contents of the site by directly using natural language, just like with an AI assistant or Copilot.” However, the scope of NLWeb is not just limited to creating AI chatbots on web pages.

Microsoft Releases an Open-Source AI Agent That Can Complete Tasks Online

The company said every such AI-powered website will also act as a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. MCP was developed by Anthropic as a universal, open standard for how AI systems connect to external data hubs. By supporting the protocol, each NLWeb website will also make its content accessible and crawlable to AI agents and other participants in the MCP ecosystem.

This will create a new structure for websites where the entire network of NLWeb-enabled websites will be readily available to AI agents for data extraction and to let them perform actions. “Ultimately, we believe NLWeb can play a similar role to HTML in the emerging agentic web,” the company said.

With NLWeb, Microsoft believes an AI agent-friendly Internet can be created, making the creation and functioning of browser-based agentic tools more common and widely prevalent. In such a system, AI agents can potentially complete much more complex tasks than just purchasing a product online. They can, for example, talk to a brand's sales agent, negotiate discounts, verify warranties, and handle returns autonomously.

Microsoft highlights that the open project is technology agnostic and supports all major operating systems, AI models, and vector databases. Notably, NLWeb was coined and developed by RV Guha, the company's recently joined Corporate Vice President and Technical Fellow.

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Further reading: Microsoft, NLWeb, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Enterprise

Akash Dutta Email Akash Dutta

Akash Dutta is a Senior Sub Editor at Gadgets 360. He is particularly interested in the social impact of technological developments and loves reading about emerging fields such as AI, metaverse, and fediverse. In hi... more »