NLWeb
Microsoft's standard for turning a website into a conversational endpoint that answers natural-language queries — and is itself an MCP server.
- term
- NLWeb
- category
- protocols
- short_def
- Microsoft's standard for turning a website into a conversational endpoint that answers natural-language queries — and is itself an MCP server.
- long_def
- Introduced by Microsoft at Build 2025 (May 2025) and led by Schema.org/RSS/RDF creator R.V. Guha, NLWeb combines a site's Schema.org data, a vector index and an LLM to answer questions grounded in the site's own content, exposing the result over a simple endpoint that doubles as an MCP server.
- see_also
mcpjson-ldagentic-web- etymology_origin
- Introduced by Microsoft at Build 2025 (May 2025); conceived and led by Ramanathan V. (R.V.) Guha, creator of RSS, RDF and Schema.org, who joined Microsoft as CVP and Technical Fellow.
- related_to
mcpjson-ldagentic-webrag- contrast_with
- Unlike MCP, which is the tool-calling protocol, NLWeb is a way to make an existing website conversationally queryable — and every NLWeb endpoint is itself exposed as an MCP server, so it builds on MCP rather than competing with it.
- example
- Microsoft introduced NLWeb at Build 2025 (May 2025) with early adopters including Shopify, Snowflake, O'Reilly Media, Tripadvisor and Eventbrite.
- source
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLWeb
- status
- emerging
- why_it_matters
- NLWeb lets a site reuse its existing Schema.org data to become an agent-queryable MCP endpoint — a low-lift path from structured data to conversational agent-readiness.
- sameAs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLWeb- bridge_entity
- protocols/interop/nlweb
- last_verified
- 2026-06-15
- md_twin
- /glossary/nlweb.md