What changed when the Copilot in SharePoint opt-outs ended on 1 November

Last Wednesday morning a site owner at a client sent me a screenshot of the Copilot button on their Legal site, a site we had opted out with KnowledgeAgentScope back in June. Nothing was broken: the preview opt-outs were honoured until 1 November 2026, and that date passed on Sunday. I covered the preparation in How to keep Copilot in SharePoint off a site after the PowerShell opt-out ends, so this post is the after picture.

What users see now

The Set-SPOTenant values are no longer what decides who gets Copilot on a site. Learn now says: “After November 1, 2026, manage availability using Site AI settings and Restricted Content Discovery.” Everyday Copilot in SharePoint comes with the Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, with “no opt-in step”.

So what changed depends on the value your tenant had:

Microsoft doesn’t spell this out per value, so the table is my reading of Learn and MC1479277.

Users without a Copilot licence still don’t get the button. Visitors don’t get it on sites where the owner turned on hiding in Settings > Site AI, but owners and members still do.

Checking it on a site

I test this with two licensed accounts: one member of the site and one visitor.

1. Sign in as the member and open the site. The Copilot button shows at the bottom right. (Check the screenshot shared earlier.)
2. Sign in as the visitor in a private window. If the owner hid Copilot for visitors, the button is gone. Below screen shots showing the visitor with copilot license can view Copilot button and after site hide it for visitors, it no longer showing up

3. Open a site with Restricted Content Discovery on. No button for either account.Below is the screenshot of site admin with Copilot License and now it is not showing the Copilot buttons.

Get-SPOTenant may still show your old KnowledgeAgentScope value. Don’t read that as the setting still working.

What Restricted Content Discovery doesn’t block

In my last post I covered what RCD takes away from a site. Now it’s the only switch left, so the gaps matter more.

What it doesn’t do:

• It doesn’t change permissions. Anyone who could open a file still can.
• It doesn’t stop search inside the site.
• It doesn’t stop Copilot working on a document the user already has open. Learn’s example is summarising an open document.
• It doesn’t cover OneDrive.

That third point catches people. A user can still open a contract from the Legal site in Word and ask Copilot to summarise it. If that’s the worry, the fix is permissions or sensitivity labels, not RCD.

If you were on NoSites, the only tenant-level lever left is who holds a Copilot licence.

Finding sites that lost their opt-out

This lists which sites have Restricted Content Discovery on, so you can compare it with the opt-out list you saved before 1 November. It uses the SharePoint Online Management Shell.

$AdminURL = "https://contoso-admin.sharepoint.com"
Connect-SPOService -Url $AdminURL

Get-SPOSite -Limit All | ForEach-Object {
    Get-SPOSite -Identity $_.Url | Select-Object Url, RestrictContentOrgWideSearch
} | Where-Object { $_.RestrictContentOrgWideSearch } |
    Export-Csv "C:\Temp\rcd-sites.csv" -NoTypeInformation

Any site on your old opt-out list that isn’t in this file now shows Copilot to licensed users. The loop is slow on a big tenant. The Start-SPORestrictedContentDiscoverabilityReport cmdlet is the faster option.