Why is Microsoft offering to turn websites into AI apps with NLWeb?

Microsoft took the covers off a new open protocol that will allow enterprises to turn their websites into AI-based applications.

Announced at its ongoing Build developer conference, NLWeb, short for Natural Language Web, is designed to help enterprises build a natural language interface for their websites using the model of their choice and data to answer user queries about the contents of the website.

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Analysts say that the open project could be Microsoft’s strategy to stake its claim on the agentic web before rivals such as Google and Amazon do, and part of the company’s long-term vision for agent-based computing, wherein agents can complete tasks on behalf of the user on the web.

“NLWeb is not just a technical protocol, it’s potentially a strategic moat, as it will allow Microsoft to turn the entire web into a programmable interface for AI agents,” said Dion Hinchcliffe, lead of the CIO practice at The Futurum Group.

“If Microsoft can standardize how the web interacts with agents, it gets a first-mover advantage in owning the interface layer for agentic computing. That’s not just good for Bing and Azure: It positions Microsoft as the hub through which AI agents operate, monetize, and govern web interactions,” Hinchcliffe explained.

Additionally, NLWeb’s support for Anthropic-developed Model Context Protocol (MCP) forms another tenet of Microsoft’s vision to create an interoperable agentic web, and the cloud services provider believes that NLWeb will act as the new HTML.

Support for MCP comes in the form of every assistant created on NLWeb being able to act as an MCP server, in turn allowing websites to make their content discoverable and accessible to agents and other participants in the MCP ecosystem, the company explained in a blog post.

Hinchcliffe sees NLWeb’s support for MCP as a realization of the potential of the protocol and Microsoft’s future strategy to give agents persistent memory, contextual understanding, and action models.

“NLWeb provides the affordance layer: A standardized way for websites to declare their capabilities in natural language so that MCP-powered agents can act on them. Together, they form the basis of Microsoft’s “agentic OS”, one that could span across the browser, desktop, and cloud,” Hinchcliffe explained.

What is NLWeb and how does it work?

NLWeb was conceived and developed by RV Guha — the creator of popular web standards, such as RSS, RDF, and Schema.org — who is currently a CVP and technical fellow at Microsoft.

NLWeb, according to Microsoft, uses frameworks such as RSS, RDF, and Schema.org along with websites’ data and LLMs to create an AI assistant or agents.While RSS, short for Really Simple Syndication, is a feed format that captures and shares changes made to a website, RDF, short for Resource Description Framework, is a standard way to exchange metadata over the web.

Schema.org, on the other hand, is another community-based project that is aimed at allowing users and enterprises to create, maintain, and promote schemas for structured data on the Internet, on web pages, and in email messages, among other environments.

As an open protocol, NLWeb supports most models, most vector databases, and major cloud platforms, such as Google Cloud and AWS.

In NLWeb’s documentation, Microsoft said that it has tested the protocol on Windows, MacOS, Linux, Qdrant, Snowflake, Milvus, Azure AI Search, and with LLMs, including Deepseek, Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude.

How does NLWeb help developers and enterprises?

NLWeb gives enterprises and developers a lightweight way to expose functionality to AI agents without needing full APIs or brittle RPA-style wrappers, analysts said.

Some of the key benefits to developers, according to Hinchcliffe, include allowing developers to describe interactions in natural language instead of writing integration code and having more control over agents via guardrails.

For enterprises, NLWeb increases content and services discoverability by other agents or Copilots being used, Hinchcliffe said.

Developers can start using the NLWeb protocol via the NLWeb GitHub repository that contains the code for the core service, connectors to popular LLMs and vector databases, tools for adding data in schema.org jsonl, RSS, etc. to a vector database of choice, a web server front end for the service, and a UI for enabling users to issue queries via this web server.

Microsoft claims that NLWeb is lightweight and scalable and can be run on clusters in the cloud, laptops, and soon on smartphones.