Microsoft excludes Domain Exclusion from MS 365 Copilot – days after rolling it out
Richard Speed Richard Speed MICROSOFT ECOSYSTEM REPORTER Published thu 6 Aug 2026 // 15:34 UTC Microsoft has abruptly withdrawn Domain Exclusion for Microsoft 365 Copilot, days after touting it as a way to stop the assistant grounding its answers in unwanted websites. If you had a list of sources you didn't trust, you're out of luck for now.Microsoft announced Domain Exclusion last month. The idea was simple and sensible: Copilot can consult the public web when answering questions, but that also gives it ample opportunity to suck in nonsense.
- ▪Richard Speed Richard Speed MICROSOFT ECOSYSTEM REPORTER Published thu 6 Aug 2026 // 15:34 UTC Microsoft has abruptly withdrawn Domain Exclusion for Microsoft 365 Copilot, days after touting it as a way to stop the assistant grounding its a
- ▪If you had a list of sources you didn't trust, you're out of luck for now.Microsoft announced Domain Exclusion last month.
- ▪The idea was simple and sensible: Copilot can consult the public web when answering questions, but that also gives it ample opportunity to suck in nonsense.
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| Original publisher | The Register |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/08/06/microsoft-excludes-domain-exclusion-from-ms-365-copilot-days-after-rolling-it-out/5284106 |
| Publication time | Thu, 06 Aug 2026 16:34:00 +0200 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-06T14:35:41.759Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-06T14:35:41.759Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | zSasE4Y0neyn · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); AI AND ML Microsoft excludes Domain Exclusion from MS 365 Copilot – days after rolling it out Perhaps an allow list of domains might be better? Richard Speed Richard Speed MICROSOFT ECOSYSTEM REPORTER Published thu 6 Aug 2026 // 15:34 UTC Microsoft has abruptly withdrawn Domain Exclusion for Microsoft 365 Copilot, days after touting it as a way to stop the assistant grounding its answers in unwanted websites.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Register.
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