Creativity · Agent Protocol
NLWeb — Microsoft's Natural-Language Web Protocol
NLWeb, announced by Microsoft at Build 2025, is an open protocol for turning any website into an agent-accessible endpoint. Sites that already publish schema.org structured data can, with a small addition, expose that same content as a natural-language API — letting an agent ask a question and receive a grounded answer with citations. Positioned as the agent-era evolution of the semantic web.
Protocol facts
- Sponsor
- Microsoft
- Status
- proposed
- Spec
- https://github.com/microsoft/NLWeb
- Interop with
- MCP, schema.org, HTTP, JSON-LD
Frequently asked questions
What problem does NLWeb solve?
Websites today are built for humans; agents often have to scrape HTML or rely on brittle APIs. NLWeb lets a site publish a natural-language endpoint an agent can query directly, reusing the schema.org data the site already emits for SEO.
How does NLWeb relate to MCP?
Microsoft has stated that every NLWeb endpoint is also an MCP server. That means an agent with MCP support can talk to any NLWeb-enabled site without vendor-specific adapters.
Is NLWeb an A2A protocol?
It's adjacent. NLWeb is primarily site-to-agent, but because NLWeb endpoints are MCP servers, one agent can use another agent's NLWeb endpoint as a tool — making it useful inside an A2A workflow.
Sources
- Microsoft — NLWeb repository — accessed 2026-04-20