Manage knowledge sources in an agent (GitHub Copilot)

After you add knowledge sources to your agent, you can view, update, and remove them from the Knowledge tab. Regular maintenance ensures your agent has access to current, relevant content.

View your agent's knowledge sources

  1. Open your agent in Copilot Studio.

  2. On the Build tab, find the Knowledge section in the right panel.

  3. Knowledge sources appear as chips showing the source name. There's no table view with type and status columns.

  4. When indexing status is available for your environment, a chip can show an indexing badge such as Indexing, Ready, Partially indexed, Indexing incomplete, or Indexing failed. Hover over the badge for details. A source that your organization's policy blocks shows a blocked indicator.

Update a knowledge source

  1. On the Build tab, in the Knowledge section, select the knowledge source you want to update.

  2. In the details dialog, review and modify the configuration (URL, site, file, or connection settings).

  3. Select Save to apply changes.

Note

Changes to the underlying content (for example, updating a document in SharePoint) are reflected automatically. You only need to update the knowledge source configuration if the location or connection settings change.

Remove a knowledge source

  1. On the Build tab, in the Knowledge section, locate the knowledge source.

  2. Select the × button on the knowledge source chip. The source is removed immediately, with no confirmation prompt. In the expanded list, use the Delete button on the row instead.

Note

Removing a knowledge source from your agent doesn't delete the original content. It only removes the agent's access to that source.

Turn web search on or off

Note

This option is available for agents powered by the GitHub Copilot harness.

Agents powered by the GitHub Copilot harness include an option to turn web search on or off as a knowledge source:

  1. On the Build tab, in the Knowledge section of the right panel.

  2. From the Add knowledge dialog, select Public websites.

  3. Turn on the Search all websites toggle, and then finish the wizard to apply the change. To turn it off later, turn the toggle off, or select × on the Search all websites chip in the Knowledge section.

    • When web search is on, your agent can supplement its responses with information from the web.
    • While web search is on, you can't add a specific public website or a Bing Custom Search configuration. Websites you already added are kept but aren't used until you turn web search off.
    • If your admin turned off web search, the toggle is disabled and the setting isn't applied.
    • When web search is off, your agent only uses explicitly configured websites.

Title matching for SharePoint sources

For SharePoint and OneDrive knowledge sources, Title is available as a property in the Filter this knowledge source builder. It supports the is equal to and does not equal operators and takes text values. The property appears only when the SharePoint title attribute filter is turned on for your environment.

Filter SharePoint and OneDrive knowledge sources

A filter limits which content from a SharePoint or OneDrive knowledge source your agent can use. When you open a SharePoint or OneDrive knowledge source, the details pane has two tabs: Details and Advanced settings. The Advanced settings tab shows Filter this knowledge source, where the filter appears as a set of statement rows. Behind the scenes, the filter is stored as a SharePoint keyword query language (KQL) expression.

Note

By default, the filter controls on the Advanced settings tab are read-only. You can review a filter that's already applied to the source, but you can't add, change, or remove statements from this tab, and changes to the filter aren't saved. The tab becomes editable only when the SharePoint additional search terms persistence feature is turned on for your environment.

How you build a filter

Each statement row has three parts: a property, an operator, and a value.

Property Operators Value
Author, Created by, Modified by, File Name contains, does not contain, is equal to, does not equal Text
Title is equal to, does not equal Text
Created, Modified on before, after, on or before, on or after Date
File Type is equal to, does not equal One of TXT, DOCX, PDF, XLSX, or ASPX
File size is equal to, does not equal, is less than, is greater than, is less than or equal to, is greater than or equal to Number, with a unit of Bytes, KB, MB, or GB

A filter can have up to 10 statement rows. Filter values are literal text; you can't use variables in them.

How rows combine

The sentence above the rows controls how the filter works:

  • Include only information keeps only the content that matches the statements. Exclude information removes the content that matches the statements.
  • all requires content to match every statement. any requires content to match at least one statement.

The whole filter uses either all or any. You can't mix both in a filter. You can't show a filter that mixes both in the rows. If a source has an existing filter that the rows can't represent, a warning appears on the tab.

Best practices

  • Review knowledge sources periodically to remove outdated or irrelevant content.
  • Use descriptive names so you can identify sources quickly.
  • Test your agent after removing sources to ensure it still answers key questions correctly.
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