The “HTML of the AI Era”? Microsoft’s NLWeb Aims to Put ChatGPT on Every Website
NLWeb is an open protocol unveiled by Microsoft at Build 2025 to put ChatGPT-like conversational interfaces on websites. NLWeb works by indexing a site’s content using HTML, RSS feeds, and Schema.org metadata and exposing it to AI models via a standard JSON over REST API with a core ask method. The system is model-agnostic and can run with any LLM, including open-source models, with Guha demonstrating an open small-scale model called GPT-4o Mini. Demonstrations on Serious Eats showed an example query for spicy and crunchy appetizers, and another for vegetarian Diwali dishes, while a jacket query on an outdoor retailer