Audience Targeting not working on News Widget on Hub Site

Question

Audience Targeting not working on News Widget on Hub Site

Susanne Duckhorn 60

Hey community,

I hope someone can help me with an issue that occurred recently.

We are using Sharepoint Online for our intranet. I have built an hub network with a hub communication site and linked communication sites last year. On the hub site, I have a landing page with a news widget that will show all news published in the hub (parameter: all sites in the hub). Also, I activated audience targeting on ALL sites in the hub including the hub site. I activated audience targeting in the news widget as well.
For targeting, we are using Microsoft 365 groups created in Outlook based on location of the user.
In the past, everything was working fine. Users on Location A were only shown articles who had the audience group of Location A. User B was shown news articles with audience group of Location B and so on.
But recently I got feedback that the hub landing page is showing ALL news articles, audience targeting is not working anymore.

I researched the issue und stumbled upon this article in the MS community:
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/discussions/sharepoint_general/audience-targeting-for-news-not-working-at-hub-site-level/1060083

I tried to set the parameter to "selected sites" and selected all sites in the hub, but it is not working (after waiting 24 hours to propagate).

Does anyone have another idea, what could be the problem and what I could try to fix the problem?
I appreciate any help you could offer me.

Thanks!

[Moderator note: personal info removed]

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Dora-T 11,050 Microsoft External Staff Moderator

Please note that our forum is a public platform, and we will modify your question to hide your personal information in the description. Kindly ensure that you hide any personal or organizational information the next time you post an error or other details to protect personal data.

Hi Susanne Duckhorn

Thank you for reaching out to the Microsoft Q&A Forum and sharing your issue.Based on my research, you could try testing this with the Highlighted Content web part to see if audience targeting works there. This can help confirm whether the issue is specific to the News web part on the hub page.

As a workaround for now, you could try reindexing the hub site (Site settings > Search > Reindex site), then wait a few hours and check again in an incognito/private browser session.

If the issue still persists after trying the steps above, it would be best to raise a support ticket with the Microsoft Support team so they can investigate further on the backend.

For further instructions, you can follow this guide: Get support - Microsoft 365 admin | Microsoft Learn

Please understand that as a forum moderator, I don’t have access to backend tools or tenant-level diagnostics. However, I hope the suggestions above can still help point you in the right direction.

Thank you for your understanding.

Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.

Dora-T 11,050 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-02-11T08:49:01.95+00:00

Hi Susanne Duckhorn

Just checking in to see if you've had a chance to check my previous response.

If you have any other questions, please feel free to reach out again.
Susanne Duckhorn 60 Reputation points

2026-02-11T11:03:10.1866667+00:00

@Dora-T I have started the reindexing and I made a small test with the highlighted content. It's the same behaviour with the highlighted content. A test user was still able to see all news.
I can have a look tomorrow when hopefully the reindexing is finished. If it is not working by then, I need to contact our internal IT support as I am not an admin for our Microsoft account and cannot create a ticket right away.

Do you have any other ideas? If not, still a lot of thanks a lot for your help :-)
Dora-T 11,050 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-02-11T11:58:43.9033333+00:00

Hi Susanne Duckhorn

Thank you for the update, I really appreciate you taking the time to test and share the results.

If the behavior remains the same after the reindexing has fully completed, then the next recommended step would be to contact your IT team so they can raise a support request with Microsoft for further investigation.

At this point, I’m sorry that I’m not able to offer any additional solutions from the forum side. Thank you again for your patience and understanding, and I hope the issue can be resolved soon.
Susanne Duckhorn 60 Reputation points

2026-02-11T12:25:15.3066667+00:00

@Dora-T I have one more aspect. I did another test on one of the subsites. It seems, that Audience Targeting is not working there as well. Does that change the situation? It seems, that Audience Targeting is not working at all on the site anymore. Anything else I could do?
Dora-T 11,050 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2026-02-11T14:03:45.93+00:00

Hi Susanne Duckhorn

Thank you for sharing this additional update..

If audience targeting is not working on the subsites as well, it suggests the behavior may be affecting audience targeting more broadly rather than being limited to the hub or the News web part itself. In this situation, I would recommend raising a support ticket as soon as possible so it can be reviewed further from the tenant side.

Since you’ve already tested with different web parts and started the reindexing process, there aren’t many additional checks that can be performed from the forum side at this stage. I’m sorry that I’m not able to offer more troubleshooting options here, but I truly appreciate the time and effort you’ve taken to test everything so thoroughly.

Thank you again for your patience and understanding.

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Audience Targeting not working on News Widget on Hub Site

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