A couple of months ago, I wrote about my experiments with using AI to supplement the search functionality on a website. Recently at Build 2025, Microsoft introduced a technology called NLWeb, which takes the concept of using LLMs to improve search for websites a lot further than I did.
What is NLWeb?
The basic premise of NLWeb is that you can feed it semi-structured formats (Schema.org, RSS, etc.), which many websites already publish for SEO, and it’ll be ingested by an LLM. You could then “talk” to the website using natural language to find the content you’re looking for.
For my previous experiment, I used ChatGPT to pick the best page to surface to a user based on their query and a list of slugs. NLWeb however, would presumably use all of a website’s content to come up with the optimal links to show based on a search query. Best of all, integration of NLWeb promises to be very easy with just a few lines of code.
A new consideration for web development?
If this takes off, and I think it will, it could promote a new offshoot of SEO for websites that encourages developers to consider how to make content easily interpretable by LLMs in addition to your typical search crawlers. Though, there could be a bit of an interesting catch-22 here. While engineering websites with semi-structured data outputs could be better for creating an impressive and useful in-site search, it might also make it even easier for general purpose LLMs to gobble up your content and resurface not-quite-facsimiles without attribution, leading to a loss of traffic. Optimistically, it might also make it easier for LLMs to provide attributions as well. I suppose it depends on LLM developers.
Try it out yourself
If you’re interested in trying out an implementation yourself, Microsoft used the following recipe website as an example of their natural language search: https://www.seriouseats.com. I’ve been playing around with it and I think it feels like it’s doing something more substantiative than the usual keyword search, but some current keyword search implementations are so good that it can be hard to tell. Even if NLWeb doesn’t massively improve the best search systems out there right now, it should help every website, regardless of budget, achieve a stellar search experience without expending too much time or money.