- Microsoft and Cloudflare want websites to behave like conversational user interface applications
- Cloudflare Autrag automatically indexes content, promising transparent updates for website data
- NLWEB presents structured MCP termination points for AI agents in search of reliable access
Microsoft and Cloudflare have announced a new collaboration that seeks to facilitate the question of websites for people and automated systems.
The initiative merges Microsoft’s “NLWEB” standard with Cloudflare’s “Autrag” infrastructure, providing a model for conversational research.
Instead of keyword navigation, the system allows a natural language interaction, with direct responses rather than links of links.
Search engines to respond to engines
The objective of the new launch is to operate any site as an AI application, where human visitors and AI agents can ask questions and receive structured answers.
“Together, NLWEB and AUTORAG allow publishers to go beyond research boxes, creating conversational interfaces for simple to create and deploy websites,” said RV Guha, creator of NLWEB, CVP and technical scholarship holder at Microsoft. “This integration will allow each website to become easily ready for AI for people and trusted agents.”
Traditional research is based on keywords, letting users pass through several links to reach relevant information, but defenders of this new approach argue that the model no longer corresponds to expectations shaped by tools such as Chatgpt, Copilot and Claude.
These systems provide immediate responses and people expect websites to do the same.
However, although this framing is convincing, it assumes that all users prefer conversational responses to navigation.
The partnership also highlights the role of AI agents as a new class of “visitors”.
These automated systems generally scratch the pages or follow keyword requests, but NLWEB introduces a structured “MCP” termination point which gives them controlled access to the data of the site.
This could reduce the ineffectiveness of scratching while allowing websites to define access terms.
However, questions remain that site operators will see tangible advantages or mainly additional technical charges.
The Autrag component of Cloudflare manages the ramp, indexing and integration of the content of the site in a managed vector database.
The system promises to keep the information cool with continuous updates and provide observability via the AI Cloudflare gateway.
Although it seems effective, this effectively places indexing and access pipelines in the hands of a third -party infrastructure provider.
This raises concerns about the cost, dependence and if the owners of sites will give up too much control over how their data is managed.
By supervising websites as first -class data sources for AI tools, Microsoft and Cloudflare are positioned in direct competition with traditional search engines, especially Google.
If AI writer models and LLM systems are increasingly based on structured access rather than scratching, research traffic models could change considerably.
To activate conversational search on a website via Autrag in Cloudflare, users connect to the Cloudflare dashboard, create a new Autrag instance using the quick deployment option of the NLWEB website, select the desired domain and start the indexing.
Once the process is completed, the content of the site becomes available via natural language requests, and the owners can prevail or integrate the conversational interface to test how it will seem to visitors.
