Microsoft turns Copilot website blocking back on after August rollback
Reviewed by Helen Jones
Microsoft has restored domain exclusion for web grounding in Microsoft Copilot and Copilot Chat. The control first appeared on 28 July 2026, was rolled back on 4 August, and was turned on again on 9 September. Microsoft Learn updated the documentation on 17 September. Administrators can name up to 1,000 sites to keep out of web page results, using the ConfigureTenantDomainExclusions.ps1 PowerShell script. Cowork follows the same tenant list. The list currently covers two levels of subdomains. Exclusions apply only to web page results. News and other search types can still be cited even when a domain is blocked. Uploading a new list replaces the old one rather than adding to it.
Until this control returned, many tenants that had started a web-grounding blocklist after the July announcement had to pause it. Users were left with a blunt choice: allow Copilot to pull from the open web, or turn web grounding off entirely, with no middle path for known junk or competitor sites. The restore is narrower than it sounds. Blocking a site does not mean Copilot will never mention it, because news and other citation types can still appear. For people trying to trust Copilot output, the real change is that IT can now reduce some web sources, not that every answer is suddenly company-only or fully checked.
Analysis
Treat this as a governance check, not a new prompt trick. Ask your admin whether a domain exclusion list is live, then add one line to your Copilot playbook: if an answer used the web, still verify citations, because a blocked site can show up through news and other search types.
Source note
Pulse published by Collab365 Spaces, reviewed by Helen Jones on . Cite as "Microsoft turns Copilot website blocking back on after August rollback", Collab365 Spaces. 2 sources referenced.