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Today Microsoft is introducing NLWeb, an open project designed to simplify the creation of natural language interfaces for websites—making it easy to turn any site into an AI-powered app. Learn more about the technology and how web publishers can get started below.
What is NLWeb?
NLWeb is an open project developed by Microsoft that aims to make it simple to create a rich, natural language interface for websites using the model of their choice and their own data. Our goal is for NLWeb, short for Natural Language Web, to be 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.
Every NLWeb instance is also a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, allowing websites to make their content discoverable and accessible to agents and other participants in the MCP ecosystem if they choose. Ultimately, we believe NLWeb can play a similar role to HTML in the emerging agentic web.
How does it work?
NLWeb leverages semi-structured formats like Schema.org, RSS and other data that websites already publish, combining them with LLM-powered tools to create natural language interfaces usable by both humans and AI agents. The NLWeb system enhances this structured data by incorporating external knowledge from the underlying LLMs (such as layering on geographic insights to a restaurant query) for richer user experiences.
As an open project, NLWeb is technology agnostic. It supports all major operating systems and allows developers to choose the components that best suit their needs, supporting all major models and vector databases.
What are the benefits to publishers?
Our goal is to bring the benefits of AI that have transformed the way people search directly to the websites themselves. 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.
Who is on the team is behind NLWeb?
NLWeb was conceived and developed by R.V. Guha, who recently joined Microsoft as CVP and Technical Fellow. Guha is the creator of widely used web standards such as RSS, RDF and Schema.org. As an open project, NLWeb has a growing list of other contributors from Microsoft and the open-source community.
Which sites are adopting it?
We’ve worked with a small cohort of early adopters to test and refine our approach to NLWeb and ensure it meets the needs of modern web publishers. We are excited for other sites of all sizes and categories to deploy NLWeb, help add new capabilities and build a robust ecosystem together.
Initial publishing and ecosystem collaborators include:
- Chicago Public Media
- Common Sense Media
- DDM (Allrecipes/Serious Eats)
- Eventbrite
- Hearst (Delish)
- Inception Labs
- Milvus
- O’Reilly Media
- Qdrant
- Shopify
- Snowflake
- Tripadvisor
The NLWeb GitHub repo contains everything you need to get started:
- The lightweight code that controls the core service to handle natural language queries, as well as documentation on how this can be extended and customized.
- Connectors to some of the most popular models and vector databases, as well as documentation to add other models of your choice.
- Tools for adding your data in Schema.org, JSONL, RSS and other formats to your chosen vector database.
- A web server frontend for the service and a simple UI that allows users to send queries to the web server.
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