DocsCapabilitiesNLWeb endpoint
NLWeb endpoint
Microsoft's conversational /ask route returning schema.org answers.
Set up NLWeb endpoint on your site
What a conversational /ask route has to return, and the response shape agents expect.
Free
Set up an NLWeb endpoint
Why an agent cares
It lets an agent ask the site a question in natural language and get structured data back, instead of crawling for it. Cite the repo-hosted spec: the published nlweb.ai certificate expired 2026-08-04, so the canonical URL is unfetchable.
Adoption
Early pilots. Named early adopters exist, behind flags or trials. Nothing has been independently measured yet.
Direction of travel: ► flat, as at .
The May 2025 launch-partner list is still the whole story, and the reference repository has never shipped a tagged release.
| Adopter | Depth | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Tripadvisor (internal frontend, not a public /ask endpoint) | production | techcommunity.microsoft.com |
| O'Reilly Media | production | oreilly.com |
| Shopify, Snowflake, Eventbrite, Hearst | announced | github.com |
What we check
Absence is never a finding. Every check below runs only once
nlWebPresent is true, so a site that has not adopted this is not assessed on it and appears in no report. 4 of these 5 can fail it. In a Lumar crawl these land on one row per site, in the crawl-level table where itemType is nlweb.| Check | Severity | Raises | On whose authority |
|---|---|---|---|
nlWebRestErrorResponse | high | usability | Lumar readiness profile |
nlWebRestMalformedResponse | high | usability | Microsoft NLWeb profile |
nlWebMcpAskToolMissingDescription | high | usability | Microsoft NLWeb profile |
nlWebMcpAskToolMissingInputSchema | high | usability | Microsoft NLWeb profile |
nlWebRestMissingSchemaOrg | informational | nothing | Microsoft NLWeb profile |
Specifications
| Document | Revision | Kind |
|---|---|---|
| NLWeb specification (repo-hosted source; cite this one) | v0.55 | specification |
| NLWeb REST API (/ask, /mcp) | living | specification |
| NLWeb project | living | guidance |
Last re-read against the published documents: .
On pinning it. Cite the repository-hosted spec source, not
nlweb.ai/docs/specification: that site's TLS certificate expired 2026-08-04, so the published URL is unfetchable. v0.55 was re-verified from the repository, whose change log ends there.