What Is NLWeb? How Wix Is Preparing Websites for AI Search

For years, we’ve been optimising websites to be found by people using search engines. Now we need to think about something else finding them too: AI agents.

Wix has recently introduced NLWeb directly into its SEO & GEO dashboard. I installed it on my own website this week. It took about a minute.

The button may be small but The shift behind is quite significant.

NLWeb settings in the Wix Dashboard

NLWeb allows supported AI agents to search and query the structured information on a website. Instead of simply crawling pages and following links, an AI agent can effectively ask a website questions about its content.

We are moving from: “Can Google find my website?” to: “Can AI understand my business well enough to answer questions about it?” And I think that changes how we need to think about websites.

What is NLWeb?

NLWeb stands for Natural Language Web. It is an open-source project introduced by Microsoft to help make websites accessible to AI agents through natural-language queries.

The idea is relatively simple. Websites already contain information about businesses, products, services, people, locations, articles and thousands of other things. Some of that information is also organised using structured data such as Schema.org markup, RSS feeds and product feeds. NLWeb provides a way for AI systems to interact with that information more directly.

Microsoft describes NLWeb as part of the move towards an agentic web — a web where AI agents don't simply return a list of links, but can interact with information and perform tasks on behalf of users.

Wix has integrated NLWeb directly into the SEO & GEO dashboard

It means website owners don't have to build the infrastructure themselves. Once NLWeb is installed, Wix indexes the site's public structured content and makes it available in a machine-readable format.

There is also an option to enable the ASK protocol, which allows compatible AI agents to ask your website questions and retrieve relevant information from it.

This is different from the way we traditionally think about search.

In a search engine, we type a query and get a list of pages that might contain the answer. With an AI agent, the goal is increasingly to get the answer itself.

For example, someone might ask an AI assistant:

“Does this company work with clients outside Australia?”

Instead of sending the user off to search through the website, a compatible AI agent could query the site's structured information and return the relevant answer.

That's the important shift: from finding pages to finding answers.

Does NLWeb improve SEO?

This is where we need to be careful.

NLWeb is not a new Google ranking factor.

Enabling it doesn't suddenly push a website higher in Google, and Wix explicitly states that NLWeb is separate from traditional search-engine indexing.

Google and Bing continue to crawl and rank websites through their own systems.

So I wouldn't describe NLWeb as an SEO trick, it is another layer of discoverability.

For years, we primarily thought about whether search engines could find and understand our websites. Then generative AI changed the conversation. We started talking about GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation — and whether AI-powered search experiences could understand, reference and recommend our businesses. Now we're beginning to see another layer emerge: AI agents that can interact with websites more directly.

SEO, GEO and NLWeb are not the same thing

There is a lot of new terminology being thrown around at the moment, so it helps to separate these concepts.

SEO 

making your website discoverable and understandable to traditional search engines.

GEO 

making your business and content understandable, credible and useful to generative AI systems.

NLWeb 

provides infrastructure that can allow compatible AI agents to query structured website content directly.

They overlap, but they are not interchangeable. All three lead us back to many of the same fundamentals:

• Clear information

• Good structure

• Useful content

• Authority

• Specificity

Which brings me to the part I find much more interesting than the technology itself.

AI discoverability is a content strategy problem

It's tempting to think that preparing a website for AI means installing another piece of technology. It doesn't.

Technology can make your information accessible. It cannot make that information good. Content strategy makes it clear, relevant and useful.

An AI agent can only retrieve a useful answer if your website contains a useful answer in the first place.

• What does your business actually do?

• Who is it for?

• What problem do you solve?

• What makes you different?

• Where do you operate?

• What does your service include?

• What does it cost?

• Why should somebody trust you?

• What evidence supports your claims?

For years, SEO encouraged businesses to create more content around every possible search term. Volume still has its place, but clarity becomes incredibly important.

What does an AI-ready website need?

Not necessarily more copy. It needs better information architecture and more meaningful information.

• Clear positioning

• Descriptive page titles and headings

• Logical relationships between services, projects, people and industries

• Accurate structured data

• Specific service descriptions

• Real expertise and original insights

• Case studies that demonstrate what the business has actually done

• Useful FAQs based on questions customers genuinely ask

• Up-to-date content.

And perhaps most importantly, a clear point of view. Being understood by AI is only half the problem. If an AI system understands ten competitors perfectly and they all say essentially the same thing, why should it choose you?

This is where brand strategy becomes even more important.

Before you enable NLWeb, there are a few things to know

I'm generally interested in making websites more accessible to AI systems, but I don't think we should switch on every new AI feature without understanding what it does. And there are some important considerations here.

You currently can't completely disconnect it

This is probably the biggest thing to know before clicking Install NLWeb.

At the time of writing, Wix says that once your site has been connected to NLWeb, you cannot completely disconnect it.

You can disable the ASK protocol later, which prevents AI agents from querying your content through it, but the NLWeb connection itself remains. That doesn't necessarily make it a reason not to use it.

You are making your public content easier for AI to consume

This is, of course, the whole point. NLWeb works with publicly available website content and Wix says existing site visibility and access rules continue to apply.

It isn't suddenly opening private member pages or confidential information to AI agents, but conceptually, you are making a decision:

I want AI agents to be able to retrieve and use my public website information more easily.

For many businesses, that's exactly what we want. If someone asks an AI assistant for a recommendation, we want the assistant to understand what the business does. Businesses with concerns around content licensing, intellectual property or how their public content is consumed by AI may want to think about that decision more carefully.

Bad information becomes easier to retrieve too

This might actually be the consideration I find most interesting.

Making your website easier for machines to understand doesn't automatically mean they will understand the right thing.

• An old price on one page

• A new price somewhere else

• An employee who left two years ago

• An old service still sitting in the CMS

• Different descriptions of what the company does across different pages

• Incorrect structured data

• Outdated locations

• Contradictory information

A human visitor might never encounter all of those inconsistencies. NLWeb makes your inconsistencies easier to find. Which means maintaining your website as an accurate source of truth becomes even more important.

I keep talking about brand curation after a website launches. A website isn't finished simply because the design is finished. Its information needs to remain accurate, coherent and aligned as the business evolves.

Could AI agents mean fewer people actually visit your website?

If an AI agent can retrieve the information someone needs directly from your website, does that person still need to visit it? Perhaps not.

This is already happening more broadly with zero-click search and AI-generated answers. And it creates an interesting contradiction: we may be making websites more discoverable while simultaneously making it less necessary for people to actually visit them.

For many service businesses, that might not be a problem at all. I don't need 10,000 people to admire my homepage. I need the right people to understand what I do and contact me. If an AI agent understands my business, determines that I'm a good match and sends me a highly qualified enquiry, that's arguably a better outcome than another website visit.

For publishers, media businesses and other models dependent on traffic, advertising or on-site engagement, the calculation could be very different.

We're still early enough that I wouldn't make dramatic predictions either way.

But it is something website owners should be thinking about.

So, should Wix website owners enable NLWeb?

For businesses that actively want their public information to become more accessible to emerging AI systems, I think it's worth considering.

I enabled it on my own website. But before doing the same, I would look at the website itself smf answer a few questions

• Is the information current?

• Is the business clearly positioned?

• Are the services properly explained?

• Is the structured data accurate?

• Does the website contain enough evidence to establish expertise and trust?

• Could someone — human or machine — understand what makes this business different?

Because giving AI better access to an unclear website doesn't solve the underlying problem.