Microsoft has withdrawn Domain Exclusion for Microsoft 365 Copilot just days after introducing the feature, which was designed to let organizations exclude specific websites from influencing web-grounded responses. The rollback highlights challenges in balancing Copilot’s access to external information with enterprise security, reliability, and governance demands. Last month, Microsoft announced the feature to give administrators control over external websites that could influence Copilot’s web-grounded responses, allowing them to specify domains to exclude when Copilot searched the public web. The idea was to provide a middle ground between unrestricted web access and disabling web grounding completely. Microsoft did not provide a detailed explanation for the withdrawal, stating: “We want to inform the community that the Domain Exclusion for Microsoft 365 Copilot feature described in this post, More control over web grounding with Domain Exclusion for Microsoft 365 Copilot, has been rolled back at this time. We understand the importance of this capability and are actively evaluating next steps. We will share additional updates with the community as soon as more information becomes available.” The feature received mixed reactions from IT administrators; many welcomed the added control, but others criticized its blocklist-based approach, arguing that an allow-list model would be more effective, limiting the AI assistant to information from a predefined set of trusted websites. Microsoft’s decision has created additional uncertainty for customers.