What information does Copilot use to answer my prompt?

Types of grounding used by Copilot

• Work grounding: Information that’s specific to your organization, such as your emails, files, chats, meetings, or web content.

• Web grounding: Current, publicly available data from the web.

• Local data grounding: Content you attached in Copilot when creating your prompt.

How does grounding work for different licenses and subscription types?

Copilot can use different information for grounding depending on your license or subscription. Not all types of grounding are available for all account types. Learn more about the different Microsoft Copilot experiences.

Select your account type to learn how grounding works for you:

Work or school account

Individual or family account

No Microsoft account

What are the limitations of grounding?

• If Copilot can't find relevant, accessible sources, it may provide a general answer. Try adding a file, link, or instructions to use a specific site to explicitly ground the response.

• Grounding improves accuracy and relevance, and you get citations to verify. However, you should still review the sources and confirm critical details before sharing.

• Copilot can provide outdated answers if you link an outdated website or old version of a file. Make sure the linked file is the latest version. If multiple files exist, point Copilot at the specific one or prompt, “Use this file only.” You can also ask: “Confirm publish date and show the exact section.”

• If your admin has turned web grounding off, Copilot won't be able to reference web content for grounding.

What does Copilot grounding have access to?

• Copilot respects your existing Microsoft 365 permissions. It can only ground responses in content that you're authorized to access.

• Copilot can access your work content in Microsoft 365 (files, emails, chats, meetings, and sites) through Microsoft Graph, limited by your permissions, if you're using a work or school account. If turned on by your admin, it can also use web grounding to bring in public information.

• Copilot doesn't train on your company's data. Copilot's LLM instances are private to your tenant and aren't used to train public models. Copilot doesn't retain prompts to train outside your tenant.