Make your website conversational for people and agents with NLWeb and AutoRAG

Hi there, my name is Anni. I'm a Product Manager here at Cloudflare, working on Autorag and R2 on our developer platform. So, we've been hearing from customers, website owners, content creators, that the traditional ways of searching on websites are no longer cutting it for their users anymore. So, no longer do people want to come to a website, use keywords to dictate or indicate their search intent, click through a couple of blue links just to skim together webpages and trying to piece together the answer that they need. We're all getting used to AI chat platforms like Copilot, ChatGBT, Gemini, I know certainly myself, I am a big fan of them, where we can ask natural language questions and get direct answers that we need. So, out goes the ways of search engine and in comes answer engines. But also, on top of that, a new type of visitors are also emerging on the web today and those are AI agents. They also suffer from a similar problem where they want to ask questions in natural language so they can get the direct answers that they need to serve back to their end users or perform automated actions with. But on top of that, they also need to ask questions and answers in a structured and predictable manner, right? So, we asked ourselves the question, how can website owners adapt to this new age of the web, the agentic web? So, to meet people and agents where they are, websites need more than incremental upgrades to keyword search, but rather they need a new model to make conversational search a part of your website's experience. And that's what we want to deliver with our partners over at NL Web. So, NL Web is an open project developed by Microsoft that defines a standard protocol for natural language queries on websites designed to serve any and all websites. So, each NL Web instance comes with two endpoints. There's the Ask endpoint, which enables natural language queries, and also the MCP endpoint, which provides also a very similar experience, but it is also backed by a model context protocol or an MCP server that you can provide agents the expected structure that they need as well. So, the goal with the protocol is to let every website have the same functionality as your favorite conversational AI apps, where users and agents alike can interact with its contents conversationally. Now, at Koffler, we have Autorag. Autorag is Koffler's managed retrieval engine that we can use to automatically crawl websites that you own, store the contents of it into R2, and embed it into a managed vector database or vectorize. This enables us to provide you with semantic or conversational search. We pair this on top with WorkWithAI and AI Gateway to provide you with AI-generated responses for that direct answer experience. So, now, by combining NL Web standard with Koffler's Autorag infrastructure, we're making it possible to try out this conversational search experience for any website that you own with just one click. So, enough talking. Why don't I just show you a demo of what I mean? So, I'm just going to share my page. So, here you're seeing Autorag's dashboard. I've already created a few Autorags, but once you land on this page, what you can do is click the Create button. So, what we've added here is an option for NL Web for websites. You can select to use this template, and you'll see a drop-down of all the domains or websites you have on Koffler. So, I'm going to select my own personal portfolio. So, I'm going to click to start indexing, and what this does in the background is we are spinning up an Autorag instance for you that has all the tuned defaults for embedding and retrieval configurations that are meant and purposeful for a purpose set for websites with large amounts of content, so content-heavy websites. And on top of that, what's unique about this template is that we're also deploying for you a worker that implements the NL Web protocol over the Autorag instance. So, right now, Autorag just finished embedding and indexing all of my content, and you can see here we also provide you the option to embed the search experience onto your website, but I can show you a little bit later what that looks like. So, let's click into this worker, and what you'll immediately see is the experience to try it out. So, via the UI, you can start asking questions about your website. So, this is my personal website. I keep several blog pages, and one of them I have is a quotes page. So, it contains a list of all of my favorite quotes I have collected over the ages. So, what is Annie's favorite quote? So, I can search, and it should be able to pull up exactly. So, my website is able to know that it's me and found my favorite quotes post, and what I can also do is actually switch to summarize mode to ask it to give me that direct answer experience, right? So, I can ask, what is the one from question? So, what you'll see here is it's actually able to interpret this query and kind of use context from past questions I've asked within the same conversation to rewrite the query in a way that is most optimized for the search. So, I didn't identify that it was about quotes in this particular question, but it's able to reinterpret this as what is Buster's quote from same. So, it's able to pick exactly the one that I have on my website, and that is, you know what's great about hitting rock bottom? There's only one way left to go, and that's up. This cheers me up every single time I hear it. Now, on top of that, you know how I was hinting about the embedded experience? Well, what you can do is take that snippet that I was just showing you, and you can actually add it directly into your website. So, I can ask a very similar thing. So, why don't I ask what is Annie's and it's able to pull up my post about my famous matcha mochi brownie recipe. Now, with all that said, I also want to share with you the experience that we have for the MCP endpoint. So, what you can do is actually go to our Koffler AI Playground website to try this out. So, I've actually put a custom domain over the worker that I have already, and I can call the MCP endpoint by first connecting it here. Then, I can ask a question what is this website. Let's run this. And let's see what is the answer it's able to give me. So, it's able to identify that this is my personal portfolio and project hub, and let's try to ask a follow-up question. Oh, let me click run. So, cool. It was able to identify that I work at Koffler. Now, on top of that, something I really want to show you all is also the experience you get once you get into the dashboard. So, into the dashboard, you'll get more information about exactly how your autowrite functions, what its regular syncing and indexing cadence is. So, what you can actually do is, let's say that I added some new content into my website, right? Autowrite will already schedule indexes, re-indexing of your website once a day, but let's say I just added that content and I want it rescheduled right now. I can click the sync button, and it will be able to trigger another crawl and sync of my website. Now, on top of that, you can also go into settings, and you can change some of those pre-tuned parameters that we have already set for you. Now, what is also super cool that I want to show is that every autowrite is paired with an AI gateway. So, what this gives you is observability and insight into what questions are being asked and what those logs look like. So, you can see here already the question I asked about Buster's quote from Sing. So, that gives you more insight into how your autowrite is functioning. So, cool. That is the demo of what we have built. So, to kind of sum it all up together, what we want to bring to you is, with a one-click experience, you can bring conversational search to your website and make it accessible to both users and AI agents with no infrastructure to manage and no code required. We believe that this is a very powerful new primitive for the website or for websites in general, and it's built entirely on Cloudflare's platform to give you that global serverless experience. So, whether you're a publisher, documentation owner, or product team looking to make your content more usable, we invite you to bring your domain over to Cloudflare and try it out today. So, with this NLWeb autowrite experience, we're in an experimental phase right now. So, if you're looking to productionize this or if you just have any feedback, comments, concerns, feel free to reach out to us at nlweb at Cloudflare.com. That is nlweb at Cloudflare.com. Thank you so much for your attention. We look forward to having you try this out. Thank you so much for your time.