Search your rollout plan for the words “Restricted SharePoint Search”. If they are in there, the plan is out of date. New enablement is blocked from 31 July 2026, and Microsoft is directing customers to Restricted Content Discovery instead. That is not a rename, and this is where people get caught. Restricted Content Discovery is a site-level control that does not change anybody’s permissions and does not take the content out of the index. What it also does, which nobody seems to expect until it happens, is strip the AI entry points off the site. The Copilot button goes. The AI actions menus go, including the one people use to create agents. So does “Create pages with AI”. You set it to keep a site out of Copilot answers and you have also quietly ended agent-building on that site.
It only covers SharePoint sites. OneDrive is not in scope, which matters more than it sounds, because OneDrive is where the drafts live. And Microsoft’s own guidance cautions that using it heavily degrades the quality of Copilot’s answers, which is the trade-off stated plainly: the more you hide, the less useful the thing you paid for becomes.
Before anyone buys anything, check whether you already have it. SharePoint Advanced Management is included with the Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, and I have watched more than one organisation put it on a purchase order twice.
The wider point is the one people skip past. Both controls do the same job in the end: they stop Copilot surfacing content that the wrong people can already open. The permissions are unchanged. Everyone who could get to that site this morning can still get to it. You have made the oversharing harder to find, not smaller.
A control that hides a site from Copilot and leaves access exactly as it was is not a fix. It is an extension on the deadline.