Co-Pilot Agent issue: Reference Documents Download Instead of Opening in Browser

Question

I have created a copilot agent in Microsoft Copilot Studio and configured a SharePoint folder as a knowledge base source. The agent is successfully retrieving answers from the SharePoint documents, and the reference document links appear correctly within the response.

However, when a user clicks on a reference document, the file is automatically downloaded instead of opening in the browser in a new tab. The expected behavior is for the document to open directly in SharePoint/Office Online for viewing.

I attempted the following approaches, but the issue still persists:

• Modified the Conversational Boosting topic
• Added prompt engineering instructions to control link behavior
• Tested different response configurations

Since the generated reference links appear to be download-based links created by the knowledge source, these customizations do not override the default behavior.

I am looking for a workaround or recommended approach to ensure that SharePoint reference documents open in the browser rather than downloading automatically.

Answer 1

Hello Harsh Patel,
This is a known limitation in Copilot Studio when using SharePoint as a knowledge source. The reference URLs are generated by the underlying retrieval system and often use download links, which causes documents to download instead of opening in the browser. Prompt engineering or Conversational Boosting cannot override this behavior.

Recommended workaround:

• Use custom citations or manually transform the SharePoint links to browser-friendly URLs (for example, add ?web=1 or use SharePoint sharing/view links).
• Alternatively, maintain custom “view” URLs in SharePoint/Dataverse and return those instead of default citations.
• Also verify the SharePoint library setting “Open in the browser” is enabled.

Currently, there is limited native control over autogenerated citation link behavior in Copilot Studio.