Configure Copilot Search
A Relecloud analyst types "RAP timeline" into Copilot Search, looking for the rollout schedule for the Relecloud Acceleration Program—the internal initiative behind a dozen internal emails this month. Copilot Search returns nothing useful: a handful of unrelated results and no sign that it recognizes "RAP" as anything other than three random letters. The analyst knows exactly what they mean. Copilot Search doesn't, because nobody ever tells it.
Recognize Copilot Search as its own surface
Copilot Search is the enterprise search experience that Microsoft 365 Copilot draws on when it looks for answers grounded in Relecloud's own content—documents, sites, and conversations that live inside the tenant, not the public web. That distinction matters, because the previous unit's web-search policy governs a completely different reach: whether Copilot and Copilot Chat can step outside the tenant to the public internet. Copilot Search never leaves Relecloud's content. It has its own administrator levers, configured separately from that policy, and two of those levers directly shape whether a query like "RAP timeline" succeeds or fails: the acronyms Copilot Search recognizes, and the bookmarks that promote key destinations straight into results.
Define organization-specific acronyms
The fix for the analyst's failed search is an acronym definition. As the administrator, you maintain a mapping of Relecloud's internal shorthand—program codes, team names, project abbreviations—to what they actually mean. Once you add an entry that maps RAP to Relecloud Acceleration Program, Copilot Search treats a future query containing that acronym as a reference to the program, not as three meaningless letters. The analyst's next search surfaces the rollout timeline, the project site, and related documents, because Copilot Search now understands Relecloud's own language instead of guessing at it.
This lever exists precisely because every organization accumulates internal shorthand that no general-purpose search engine ships with pre-loaded. Relecloud's acronyms aren't in any public dictionary, and they change as programs launch, rename, and retire. Maintaining that list is ongoing work, not a one-time setup step—every new internal initiative is a candidate for a new entry, and a stale mapping left behind after a program renames can point Copilot Search toward outdated results just as easily as a missing one leaves it pointing nowhere.
Try it yourself: Think of an acronym or internal shorthand your own organization uses often—a program name, a team code, an internal system nickname. Would a generic search engine resolve it correctly, or would it need the same kind of definition Relecloud adds for "RAP"?
Promote key destinations with bookmarks
The second lever works alongside the first. Where acronyms teach Copilot Search to understand Relecloud's internal language, bookmarks make sure the right destination surfaces the moment someone searches for it. A bookmark is an admin-curated result—a title, a URL, and a set of keywords—that Copilot Search promotes to the top of results whenever a query matches those keywords. When a new hire searches "expense tool" or "RAP site," a bookmark points them straight to the approved internal page or tool instead of leaving them to sort through ranked documents. Bookmarks and acronyms configured for Microsoft Search carry over to Copilot Search automatically, so anything Relecloud already curated is already in effect.
Because a bookmark overrides normal ranking for its keywords, a stale or wrong one is its own kind of risk: a bookmark still pointing at a retired site sends everyone who searches that term to the wrong place, with the authority of a top result. Curating bookmarks is therefore the same ongoing discipline as acronyms—add them as Relecloud stands up new tools and initiatives, and retire them the moment a destination moves or is decommissioned, so the promoted answer always reflects where the authoritative content actually lives today.
Configure Copilot Search from a single place
Both levers live in the Copilot Search configuration for your organization, alongside other administrator settings for the feature—and they're shared with Microsoft Search, so curation done in one place applies to both. Rather than memorizing a click path that can shift as the admin experience evolves, treat the decision itself as the durable part: define the acronyms Relecloud actually uses, and curate the bookmarks that point people to the right internal destinations. External web content isn't a Copilot Search lever at all—that reach is governed by the Allow web search in Copilot policy from the previous unit—so Copilot Search itself stays scoped to Relecloud's tenant content. That's the working model to carry forward, and it's the one that keeps Copilot Search useful without quietly expanding what it can reach.
Learn more about setting up Copilot Search for your organization.
You've decided what content Copilot can reach. Next you decide which models can reach your prompts—and that decision can send data to a company that isn't Microsoft.