Monday, September 01, 2025
Microsoft and Cloudflare have joined forces in a new initiative designed to make websites easier for both people and AI systems to navigate. The collaboration combines Microsoft’s NLWeb standard with Cloudflare’s AutoRAG infrastructure, setting the stage for a new era of conversational search.
Instead of forcing users to rely on traditional keyword searches that generate long lists of links, this system enables natural language queries and delivers direct, structured answers.
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The vision behind this launch is to make any website function like an AI-powered application, where both human visitors and AI agents can ask questions and receive meaningful, accurate responses.
“Together, NLWeb and AutoRAG let publishers go beyond search boxes, making conversational interfaces for websites simple to create and deploy,” said R.V. Guha, creator of NLWeb, CVP, and Technical Fellow at Microsoft. “This integration will enable every website to easily become AI-ready for both people and trusted agents.”
For a long time, keyword-based search was the norm but today, people expect something smarter and more intuitive. Tools like ChatGPT, Copilot, and Claude have trained users to expect immediate, conversational answers. Advocates of this model argue that websites must evolve to meet those rising expectations.
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This collaboration also highlights the growing importance of AI agents as digital “visitors.” Historically, these automated systems scraped web pages or followed keyword-based queries to extract information. With NLWeb, however, websites can expose a structured MCP (Machine-Consumable Publishing) endpoint, giving AI agents controlled access to data.
This approach could eliminate inefficient scraping, improve data accuracy, and let site owners set the terms of access. Still, questions remain about whether operators will see clear business benefits or face added technical complexity.
Cloudflare’s AutoRAG technology powers the infrastructure side of the integration. It crawls, indexes, and embeds site content into a managed vector database, ensuring the information is continuously updated. Website owners also gain observability through Cloudflare’s AI Gateway, which provides visibility into how content is being accessed and used.
However, relying on third-party infrastructure for indexing and access raises potential concerns. Businesses may need to weigh costs, vendor dependency, and data control against the benefits of adopting conversational search.
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By positioning websites as structured data sources for AI systems, Microsoft and Cloudflare are moving into territory traditionally dominated by search engines like Google. If AI assistants and large language models (LLMs) increasingly rely on structured access rather than web scraping, the ripple effects could dramatically reshape search traffic and SEO strategies.
For businesses ready to experiment, enabling conversational search is straightforward. Through the Cloudflare Dashboard, users can create a new AutoRAG instance using the NLWeb Website quick deploy option, select their domain, and begin indexing content. Once live, site owners can preview or embed the conversational interface to see how it will appear to visitors.
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This collaboration signals a broader shift in how websites will be experienced in the future. Instead of functioning purely as static repositories of information, sites will increasingly act like AI-ready platforms, capable of supporting both human users and automated agents with natural, conversational interactions.
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