The “HTML of the AI Era”? Microsoft’s NLWeb Aims to Put ChatGPT on Every Website
Imagine every website you visit could talk back – answering your questions in natural language, like a built-in ChatGPT trained on that site’s content. That’s the bold idea behind NLWeb, an open protocol unveiled by Microsoft at its Build 2025 conference. NLWeb promises to make the internet “conversational” by transforming ordinary websites into AI-powered chat interfaces news.microsoft.com theverge.com. With just a few lines of code, any site or app can deploy a custom chatbot that understands free-form questions and responds with relevant answers drawn from the site’s own data – essentially offering ChatGPT-level search on any website theverge.com theverge.com. Microsoft’s CTO Kevin Scott even likens the underlying technology to the web’s next big paradigm: “kind of like HTTP for agents,” a foundational layer for an emerging “agentic web” of AI applications infoworld.com simform.com. Some are calling NLWeb the “HTML of the AI era,” suggesting it could play a role as pivotal for AI-driven interactions as HTML did for the early World Wide Web news.microsoft.com greyhoundresearch.com. NLWeb is an open-source project designed to simplify the creation of natural language interfaces for websites news.microsoft.com news.microsoft.com. In essence, NLWeb provides a standard protocol for asking a website questions in plain language and getting
