Microsoft announces a revolutionary AI project: to turn websites into AI-intelligent applications Several years back, Microsoft revealed a revolutionary new AI technology project called Natural Language Web (NLWeb).
Revealed at the firm’s Build 2025 event, NLWeb is open-sourced effort to allow people to search web content by asking questions using natural language – in the same way as talking to an AI assistant.
The basic concept of NLWeb is to explore new boundaries, which deviate from the keyword-based search engines, and the static Web models.
Integrating AI in the very fabric of the web, NLWeb enables users to ask questions and get straight forward answers in natural language, specific to context.
This is accomplished by using semi-structured data formats that are already in use by many websites, e.g., Schema. org and RSS feeds, and merging it together with the recent Large Language Models (LLMs) such as some developed by leading AI companies, OpenAI (GPT family), Google (Gemini), and Anthropic (Claude family).
According to a software company, Microsoft NLWeb can be the “quickest and easiest way to turn your website into an AI app that works with your content.” Each NLWeb-enabled website will also act as a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server.
The nascent standard MCP, which Anthropic is leading, enables AI systems and agents to easily find, access, and interpret information across the web.
The objective of this native integration between NLWeb and MCP is to flourish an “agentic web” where AI agents are capable of factitiously conducting business, such as providing customer service and processing returns to haggling over of transactions for users.
The effort comes from internet veteran R.V. Guha who also serves as a Microsoft Corporate Vice President and Technical Fellow.
NLWeb is technology-agnostic, being supported in all mainstream OSes (Windows, Linux, macOS) and supporting diverse AI models and vector databases.
Its initial set of partners, among them Chicago Public Media, event management and ticketing company Eventbrite, O’Reilly Media, Shopify and Tripadvisor, have actually already helped to inform the features of NLWeb.
“M” The.NET Micro Framework is the basis for a family of embedded products, and the software version of this platform has been made available free of charge by Microsoft with source code and technical documentation to customise and extend.
Also, a minimal web server frontend is provided for easy integration into modern web setups.
According to Microsoft, it sees NLWeb as potentially serving something akin to the role HTML has played in the sharing of documents.
By helping the web be smarter, better and stronger, NLWeb could dramatically improve user experience and make a better case for a more lively, more AI-forward web.