Description: Understanding Microsoft 365 Copilot web search controls | Digital Deep Dive: Copilot Control SystemUnderstanding Microsoft 365 Copilot web search controls | Digital Deep Dive: Copilot Control System

Understanding Microsoft 365 Copilot Web Search Controls | Digital Deep Dive: Copilot Control System

In this topic, learners will explore how Microsoft 365 Copilot manages and controls access to web-based content, ensuring safe and compliant use of external information within enterprise environments. As Copilot agents are capable of drawing insights from both internal and external data sources, organizations need to understand how web search behavior is governed, filtered, and secured.

This digital deep dive focuses on the web search controls built into the Copilot Control System—critical for IT administrators, educators, and team leaders who want to strike the right balance between open exploration and strict data governance.

Key learning objectives include:

• How Copilot Uses the Web

  • Learn when and how Microsoft 365 Copilot reaches out to the web to answer questions, provide definitions, fetch news updates, or enrich user prompts.

  • Understand the difference between internal-only prompts and those that trigger web-enhanced responses through Bing Chat for Enterprise or Microsoft Search.

• Search Control Settings

  • Dive into Microsoft 365 Admin Center settings that control whether Copilot is allowed to access external web content.

  • Configure options to restrict web results by user role, sensitivity of request, or application (e.g., allowed in Word but not in Teams).

  • Learn how SafeSearch filters, content moderation, and domain restrictions can be enforced.

• Privacy and Data Protection in Web Search

  • Understand how queries sent to Bing Chat for Enterprise are handled with no data logging, no tracking, and no AI model training based on user input.

  • Learn how to preserve data boundary integrity so sensitive organizational data is not inadvertently shared or mixed with public web data.

• Compliance and Policy Enforcement

  • Use tools like Microsoft Purview, Audit Logs, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps to monitor Copilot’s use of web search features.

  • Set up custom security policies to prevent access to unauthorized websites or unverified sources.

• Use Case Demonstrations

  • See real-world examples of enabling or restricting Copilot web search in scenarios like student research, business intelligence gathering, or executive briefing preparation.

By the end of this topic, learners will have a solid understanding of how to control and customize web search behavior in Microsoft 365 Copilot—ensuring AI remains a secure, accurate, and trustworthy tool, even when it looks beyond the organization's own data.