M365 Copilot claiming "You have turned off web search in the work mode"? Easy fix!

4 min read.

This article explains how to enable Web Search for Microsoft 365 Copilot, when Copilot for Microsoft 365 thinks it’s disabled for whatever reason. But fear not! Most of the time there’s just a simple switch you need to flip to enable M365 CoPilot to access Web results for you.

But let’s take a step back, open our Co-Pilot apps and do the unthinkable – ask it to access some forbidden knowledge. On the public interwebs.

Background

Table of Contents

Microsoft 365 Copilot keeps getting updated and getting the latest and greatest new features – sometimes the latest, sometimes the greatest, that is. And a recent “latest” one I got was this new mode, where the application forgot how to search the internet (it used to work before!)

How does this new mode surface? Well, it turns on automatically, and the next time you try to search for something that might need information from the web (outside what the LLM already contains or what the orchestrator can find on your tenant), you’ll get an error like below.

This error may or may not be accompanied by a slightly gaslighty statement, somewhat following the idea below:

You have turned off web search in the work mode. Copilot responses won't include the latest data from the web.

A-ha. No I most definitely have not. And I actually like those results. So let’s ask Copilot, how to turn it on again.

Let’s repeat that:

Currently, I don't have the capability to enable web search directly. Use Bing or Google.

Nice. You can use Bing or Google, because you shall not have Web Search in your Copilot.

But this, of course, is false. Just like you did not disable Web Search, chances are you still can enable Web Search, and it usually isn’t even that difficult. Read on.

Problem

So to recap: Something caused Copilot to forget how to search for information online, and that something wasn’t me nor my admin.

To undo that change, we need to teach Copilot how to fetch online results again, and it itself has no idea how to do that.

Solution

Since you, in all likelihood, do not have access to any centralized Copilot in Microsoft 365 controls (and I’m not saying anyone really does – CoPilots are too shiny to control, after all!), you will have to do with the very limited user-scoped controls instead.

But this should really be all that we need! In your normal Co-Pilot chat window, select the little “extension” icon (it’s tooltip says “Manage Copilot response”, but… You know) to open up the extensibility options.

The UI will probably keep changing, but here’s what it looks like now in web view:

Or in the Teams app, in dark view (I guess it’s the same, but maybe you like the dark view more):

At this time I won’t be taking questions about “documents related to gardening”, thank you very much.

When the menu pops open, you might see something like this:

Something – or someone, a gremlin or a jealous Clippy, perhaps – has disabled “Web content”. And the solution might be as easy as flicking the switch. Sometimes it really does work like that.

So, give it a go.

But if after flicking the switch, your M365 Copilot in Teams still struggles to get anything done (like in my example below), and keeps complaining about lacking access to web search, you could always…

Even after enabling “Web content” my Teams CoPilot in M365 was still struggling to access search results from outside my tenant.

Drumroll, please…

Try turning it off and on again.

Yes – really. Disable Web content on the “Manage Copilot response” menu, and then re-enable it again, and it should work.

And if it doesn’t, maybe try turning the whole Teams app off and on again for good measure.

However, if you get an error along the lines of “Your organization has turned off Web Search. Please contact your administrator”, there’s a 20% chance that your organization has turned off Web Search and you should contact your administrator, and a 80% chance someone dropped the latest Teams executable on its head before shipping, and this’ll be fixed by closing the Copilot chat window and opening it anew.

The same thing should work if the “Web content” is actually disabled in the extensions dialog.

Unless, of course, your organization actually disabled Web Search for your Copilot for 365 in Microsoft Teams, in which case you do actually need to get in touch with an admin. But chances are they didn’t, and you’ll just get a confused/annoyed response if you do bother them with this little bug that’s in no way their fault or under their control.

Yes – yet another case of “have you tried turning it off and on again” – but trying that first might save you the trouble of having to hear it from tech support. 😁

… Does anyone else think we’ve kind of come a full circle here? The AI needs to be turned off and on again occasionally to help it retain some of it’s capabilities. At least that’s better than what ~~Microsoft’s~~ 343 Industries Cortana became in the end…

And still more useful than Cortana in Windows Phone.

So I guess we shouldn’t complain. 🙄

Author
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Antti K. Koskela

Developer / Speaker / Consultant at Koskila / Precio Fishbone / Norppandalotti Software Co / Alter - Experience Ideas Ltd

Antti Koskela is a proud digital native nomadic millennial full stack developer (is that enough funny buzzwords? That's definitely enough funny buzzwords!), who works as Solutions Architect for Precio Fishbone, building delightful Digital Workplaces.

He's been a developer from 2004 (starting with PHP and Java), and he's been working on .NET projects, Azure, Office 365, SharePoint and a lot of other stuff. He's also Microsoft MVP for Azure.

This is his personal professional (e.g. professional, but definitely personal) blog.

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