Use the Copilot connectors API

You can use Microsoft 365 Copilot connectors (formerly Microsoft Graph connectors) to bring data from external services into Microsoft Graph. The Copilot connectors API enables you to index external data in order to power intelligent experiences in Microsoft 365, such as Copilot and Microsoft Search.

Requests to index data are performed on behalf of an application without the presence of a signed-in user via an access token with application permission.

Build a custom Copilot connector

Building a custom Copilot connector involves four steps:

1. Create an Entra ID (formerly known as Azure Active Directory) app registration. Along with the request to Microsoft Graph, you submit the name of the app registration and API permissions that your app needs. Microsoft Graph responds with information about the newly created app registration.
2. Create an external connection. Each connection requires a unique ID, name, and a description.
3. Create the schema for the external connection. The schema defines the shape of external content that you'll ingest through this Microsoft Graph connection. Creating the schema is a long-running operation. After you submit the schema to create the connection, Microsoft Graph responds with a URL that you can use to check the status of the operation. The schema is being provisioned as long as the operation status is inprogress. When provisioning completes, the operation will return a completed status.
4. Ingest external content. For each external item, extract it from the source content repository, transform it so that it matches the schema for your external connection, and submit it to Microsoft Graph as an external item. Along with the item, include information about who's allowed to access it, also known as the access control list (ACL).

The following is a sequence diagram that illustrates the four steps to build a Copilot connector.

Common use cases

The following table lists common use cases for the Copilot connectors API.

Use cases	REST resources	See also
Configuration actions
Create, update, or delete a connection	externalConnection	externalConnection methods
Register a schema for the external data	schema	schema methods
Indexing actions
Add, update or delete a custom item in the index	externalItem	externalItem methods

Known limitations

The following are current known limitations:

• An application is limited to 25 concurrent operations on a connection.
• Maximum size of an externalItem entity is 4 MB.

Next steps

• See the Microsoft Search API overview.
• Drill down on the methods, properties, and relationships of the externalConnection, schema, and externalItem resources.
• Check out the Microsoft Graph postman collection (learn more)
• Check out the sample search connector from GitHub.