Testers unable to get answers from Copilot agent in Stage environment

Question

I’ve deployed a Copilot Studio agent to the Stage environment and shared it with a few testers for validation. However, I’m running into an issue where only the maker (myself) is able to get answers from the agent. When testers ask the same questions, the conversation is always routed to the Fallback topic.

Some additional context:

• The agent uses a SharePoint folder as its knowledge source. I’ve verified that all testers have read permission to the SharePoint folder. One of the tester is the Sharepoint site owner.
• Testers have tried accessing the agent via Microsoft Teams and Copilot for Microsoft 365, and the behavior is the same in both channels.

What could be the cause and how to fix this?

Answer 1

Hi KS chin,

The issue occurs because SharePoint-based generative answers in Microsoft Copilot Studio use delegated permissions, meaning the agent retrieves data using each tester’s identity—not the maker’s. If the agent cannot access SharePoint content for a user, it returns no results and routes the query to the fallback topic.

Even if testers have access in Microsoft SharePoint, this problem typically happens due to one of the following:

Incorrect or incomplete permissions on the specific folder/files (not just site-level access)

Missing or misconfigured authentication in Microsoft Entra ID (e.g., required delegated permissions or admin consent not granted)

Knowledge source not properly enabled or synced in the Stage environment

SharePoint content not indexed/searchable, so no results are returned

To fix this:

Ensure testers have direct read access to the exact files/folder used as the knowledge source

Verify Entra ID app permissions and admin consent are correctly configured

Confirm the knowledge source is enabled and published in Stage

Check that documents are indexed and searchable in SharePoint

In short, this is usually a delegated access or configuration issue, not a bug—once access and authentication are correctly aligned, testers will start getting answers instead of fallback.

Thanks,  

Karan Shewale. 

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Answer 2

The most likely cause is that the agent’s SharePoint-based knowledge source isn’t usable for testers due to authentication/permission configuration, even though they have SharePoint access. In that case, the agent can’t retrieve generative answers for them, so their questions fall through to the fallback topic.

Key points from the scenario and context:

1. SharePoint generative answers use delegated permissions
   • Generative answers over SharePoint rely on delegated permissions when searching. Each user must have at least read permissions on the relevant sites and files, or no search results are returned.
   • When a user lacks effective permissions (or the delegated access isn’t configured correctly), no results are returned and no explicit error is shown; it simply looks like no documents were found.
2. App registration / agent authentication may be misconfigured
   • For SharePoint-based generative answers, admins must configure authentication with Microsoft Entra ID and set the required scopes in both:
     • The app registration, and
     • The agent’s authentication settings in Copilot Studio.
   • If required scopes are missing or consent hasn’t been granted, no results are returned for users, again with no visible error. The maker might still see results if testing under different credentials or if configuration was done only for that account.
3. Knowledge source and node configuration
   • If the generative answers node isn’t correctly configured or enabled for all users (for example, knowledge sources not enabled in the node, or content moderation too strict), questions can be routed to fallback instead of using the knowledge source.

To fix the issue:

1. Verify SharePoint permissions for testers
   • Confirm that all testers have at least read access to the specific SharePoint folder and files used as the knowledge source (not just to the site generally).
   • Ensure the folder/files are shared with those users or groups as needed.
2. Validate app registration and authentication configuration
   • In Microsoft Entra ID, open the app registration used for the agent’s SharePoint generative answers and confirm:
     • The necessary delegated scopes for SharePoint/Graph are present.
     • Admin consent has been granted for those scopes.
   • In Copilot Studio, open the agent’s authentication settings and ensure the same scopes are configured and aligned with the app registration.
   • If scopes were missing or consent not granted, add them and grant consent, then have testers try again.
3. Confirm generative answers node and knowledge source settings
   • In Copilot Studio, open the generative answers node used by the agent and verify:
     • The SharePoint knowledge source is enabled in that node.
     • The number of knowledge sources does not exceed the documented maximum.
     • Content moderation is set to an appropriate level so that normal business questions are not blocked.
   • If conversational boosting is used and not providing enough coverage, consider adding a dedicated topic with trigger phrases aligned to the SharePoint knowledge.
4. Re-test with a non-maker account after changes
   • After updating permissions and authentication, have a tester sign in, ask the same questions, and verify that answers now come from the SharePoint knowledge source instead of the fallback topic.

If, after these checks, testers still cannot get answers, capture a test conversation ID from a tester session and use the “Flag an issue” option in the Test your agent pane to report the problem for further investigation.

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References:

• Generative answers pointing to SharePoint sources don't return results
• Test your agent's knowledge sources
• Test your agent
• Unstructured data as a knowledge source
• Copilot Studio Agent doesn't recognize the docs in the Knowledge Base. - Microsoft Q&A