Your Microsoft Ads Run in Copilot, and You Cannot Opt Out

Open a Microsoft Advertising account and a share of your budget starts running inside an AI assistant. You were not asked, you cannot decline, and you will never see what it produced.

That is three sentences from Microsoft’s own documentation, which we set out below in full. It is not a scandal and it is not hidden. It is a characteristic of the product, and it belongs in the decision to open the account rather than in the third monthly report.

The second thing worth knowing before that decision is the reason most of these accounts get opened at all: the ability to target by company, industry and job function, borrowed from the professional network Microsoft owns. That capability covers twenty-three markets. The United States is one of them. The United Kingdom is not, and neither is any country in the European Economic Area.

This page covers what this channel serves without asking, what it requires before it will serve at all, what its search engine is genuinely worth in your market as opposed to on the slide you were shown, and what the Google Ads import quietly changes on the way in.

What you cannot opt out of

The second thing to know before opening the account sits in three sentences of the documentation, and they have to be read together.

Enrolment is automatic. “Ads in Copilot are automatically created from your existing campaign assets, including text and images. All eligible campaign and ad types are automatically enrolled to serve in Copilot.”

Opting out is not possible. “Advertisers cannot opt out of this delivery, and there is no guarantee that their ads will be displayed there.” Both halves of that sentence carry weight: you cannot decline, and nothing is promised in return.

And there is no measurement. “Microsoft Advertising does not currently support specific metrics for ads served in Copilot.”

Put end to end, those three sentences describe a share of your budget spent with no consent available and no way to read it. That is not a scandal. It is a characteristic of the product, and it belongs in the decision to open the account rather than in the third monthly report.

Two qualifications, and both go the right way. There is a concrete eligibility condition: search ads must carry a logo to be eligible for display in Copilot, so leaving the logo extension empty mechanically reduces your eligibility. And the one documented control lever does work: negative keywords apply to Copilot in the same way as to web searches. That is another reason to take your exclusion list seriously.

Copilot appears in no delivery setting. It is not a placement you buy or untick. It is an automatic extension of the search inventory.

The targeting that justifies the account, and the country list that decides it

This is the reason most of these accounts get opened, so it is worth settling first.

What it does. Three attributes: company, industry and job function. On Search, dynamic and Shopping campaigns it operates as bid adjustment only, which means it excludes nobody: it raises or lowers your bid when the attribute is recognised. On Audience campaigns you can also use it to target. Company lists went from 1,000 names to 10,000 in September 2026, entered by hand, with no file import. The help article still says 1,000, which is one of several places where two Microsoft documents disagree.

And now the list. The market availability page states that LinkedIn profile targeting is available globally in Microsoft Advertising, and then that the underlying data excludes consumers from European Economic Area countries for regulatory reasons. Twenty-three markets follow: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Nigeria, Peru, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Taiwan, Thailand, the United States and Vietnam.

The United Kingdom is not on it. And that is not an oversight you can argue with: a Microsoft blog post of 30 September 2026 says it in words, that the underlying consumer data excludes users in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland.

That deserves stating plainly, because it is the opposite of what most British advertisers assume. Leaving the European Union did not move the United Kingdom into the American column here. On this feature it sits with the countries that cannot use it, and the one explicit sentence naming it sits in a blog post rather than in the product documentation.

So, concretely. If you are selling into the United States, company and job-function targeting is real and it is the argument for this channel. If you are selling into the United Kingdom or the European Union, it is not available for your audience, and if someone sold you the account on that basis, the market page settles it in two minutes.

One caveat even where it works. Bid-only targeting does not build an audience, it leans on one. You are still buying the keyword. It changes what you pay for a user the system believes matches, and nothing else.

The obligation that stops your measurement without telling you

This one appears in no sales deck, and its failure mode is silent.

Consent is not optional, and it has a date. Since 5 May 2025, advertisers with end users in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland must send consent signals, either through the tag’s consent mode or through the industry transparency and consent framework. Never both at once. The signal Microsoft enforces is a single value on ad storage, granted or denied.

Note the geography, because it is the reverse of the one above. On LinkedIn profile targeting the United Kingdom sits with Europe and loses the feature. On consent it sits with Europe again and gains the obligation. The United States has the targeting and not the obligation. Two features, two maps, and neither follows the political one. If you run one account across these markets, you are running different products and different duties through a single interface.

The penalty is not financial, which makes it worse. Where the signal is missing, Microsoft stops tracking your tag-based conversions and stops populating your remarketing lists. You continue spending and you stop measuring. A campaign that has reported nothing for months may be suffering from this rather than from performance.

And the defaults differ by region. For most countries, if the consent setting is not set, the tag treats it as granted. In the enforcement regions, the absence of a signal means denied. So the same misconfiguration is invisible in Chicago and fatal in Manchester.

Modelled conversions are announced as coming, to recover some of what refusal costs, but no release date is published. Do not build a recovery plan on them yet.

Where your ads run, and what the channel does not say about it

The network splits in two, and the documentation describes both halves with a turn of phrase worth taking seriously.

Search. Ads “may appear with search results on sites such as Microsoft Bing, AOL, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia and other partners.”

Audience. Ads “may appear on sites such as MSN, Microsoft Start, Microsoft Edge, Outlook.com and partner publishers.” Concretely: the Edge new tab page, the Outlook inbox, the MSN portal, and casual games from Microsoft and King, Candy Crush among them.

“Sites such as” is not a list. It is a set of examples, and the channel publishes no complete roster of its syndication partners anywhere. You are buying inventory whose composition you do not know.

And you cannot fully leave it. There are two delivery settings. The first covers the whole network. The second, presented as the restrictive one, covers “Microsoft sites and select traffic”, meaning it keeps “select partner traffic with similar ad performance and conversion rates to Microsoft Bing”. There is no Microsoft-only option.

Nor can you see the detail. The documentation puts it plainly: “because these sites are reported in aggregate, you cannot view individual reports for each domain.” A remedy exists, but only after the fact: pull the publisher URL report and exclude domains as you go.

Two scope points the comparisons forget. The content network is dead: “Microsoft Advertising has stopped serving ads on the content network.” And syndicated search carries a geographic restriction the channel flags without documenting, saying it “is only available in certain countries” and linking to a page that contains no country list. The link is broken, so the exact status of any given country is not public.

What Bing is actually worth, and the trap in every figure you have seen

This is the number that decides whether the account gets opened, and almost everyone quotes the wrong one.

The trap first, because it explains the rest. Search-engine share is published two ways: across all devices, and on desktop only. Bing is the default engine in Edge on Windows, and Windows is what sits on office desks, so its desktop share is multiples of its real one. Quote the desktop figure as though it were the share and you overstate this channel by a factor of two to three.

Here is the gap, measured on the same source in the same month, October 2026.

The ratio is the story. In the United States, desktop share is 1.9 times the all-device share. In the United Kingdom it is 3.1 times. A British advertiser quoting a desktop figure overstates this channel by more than three. And the British mobile figure is the one to sit with: 0.48%. On phones, in the United Kingdom, this channel is a rounding error.

One honest note on the method. These are search-engine referrals measured across a panel of more than a million sites, not a count of searches performed. It is a panel measurement, not a census, and it is the best public series available.

And the figure Microsoft puts in front of you is none of these. Its search product page displays a 38.1% market share. The footnote tells you everything: Comscore qSearch, Explicit Core Search (custom), March 2023, United States, desktop traffic only. Wrong device, and three and a half years old. For an American reader that is worth dwelling on: the number was built from American data, so it looks like it is about you, and it still is not the number to use.

The same applies to the reach claims. The 6.4 billion monthly searches and 109 million unique users on the same page carry the same footnote: Comscore, March 2023, United States, desktop only. The Audience Network’s “up to 1 billion customers” is sourced to Microsoft internal data from October 2023, with no method given. And for Copilot, no user figure is published at all.

The defensible sentence, for the United States: Bing is around 10% of searches across all devices and around 19% on desktop, the advertising network extends beyond Bing, and Microsoft publishes no current reach figure of its own. For the United Kingdom, make that around 7% and 21%, with mobile at half a per cent.

What it costs to start, and what the channel publishes about price

There is no published minimum budget. The guidance Microsoft offers is to start with a small budget and scale as you learn what works, which is advice rather than a threshold.

The only floors published are in the import documentation, and they are tiny: a minimum daily budget of five cents, a minimum Search bid of five cents, and a minimum Shopping bid of one cent, in dollars or pounds. For Shopping the recommended minimum bid is five cents in the United States and the United Kingdom, and below that the offer only serves in the shopping tab.

What that means in practice. There is no financial barrier to opening this account. The real constraint is elsewhere, in the conversion volume needed before anything becomes readable.

The billed event depends on the campaign type, and no single page assembles it. Search, Shopping and product ads are pay per click, and only standard-quality clicks are charged. Audience campaigns on manual CPM are charged per thousand viewed impressions. Premium streaming is the one place with a cost per completed view. App ads use a manual cost per install. Lodging is per click, with a fixed price per night or a percentage of the room rate. For Performance Max, the documentation does not state the billed event.

One change worth knowing if you are porting a strategy across: since 4 August 2025, target cost per acquisition and target return on ad spend cannot be created as standalone strategies. You use maximise conversions with a cost target, or maximise conversion value with a return target.

And on price itself, the channel publishes nothing. No average cost per click, no range, no index. Its own pages say costs vary with competition and demand and that you set the maximum you are willing to pay, and its guidance for new advertisers says what counts as good will vary by industry. We have gone through where the figures in circulation actually come from in cost per click explained. The short version for this channel: one number, 1.54 dollars, is repeated by three separate benchmark pages, none of which publishes a sample, a period or a country. That is not three sources agreeing. That is one unsourced figure with three outfits.

What the Google Ads import quietly drops

The import is the first move in almost every account on this channel, and the channel warns about it itself: “keep in mind that not all information will be imported. After importing, review your campaigns and add back any missing information.”

Here is what degrades, and the first item is the most expensive one.

Fine geographic targets are widened. Unsupported cities are automatically expanded to the region or county. A town-level target can therefore become a regional one, with no alert. Two options guard against it, “don’t expand unsupported location targets” and “pause campaigns when all imported targets are unsupported”. Neither is on by default.

The attribution model changes in silence. “If you’re using data-driven attribution in Google Ads, we’ll import it as last click.” Your numbers stop being comparable and nothing tells you. Worth knowing alongside: this channel’s default model is last click, its default conversion window is 30 days, and its view-through window is one day.

Bid strategies fall back. Unsupported ones revert to manual cost per click for Audience campaigns, and to enhanced cost per click for everything else.

Conversion goals are filtered. Only those that are online, tag-based, destination-URL type and created in Google Ads come across. Google-hosted conversions and smart goals do not. And a goal sharing a name with an existing Microsoft goal is not imported until it has been renamed.

Demographics are cut back. Only age and gender carry over, not parental status and not household income.

Budgets below the floor are raised automatically to the channel’s minimums, and a Google campaign that included search partners ends up running across the whole search network.

And the import does not place the tag. You have to install the tracking tag on the site for imported goals to receive anything at all. An imported campaign can therefore run for weeks reporting no conversions, not because it produces none, but because nothing is recording them. Combine that with the measurement stoppage a consent failure causes, and you have the single most common reason a Microsoft account gets written off as producing nothing.

The ad library exists, and it is not for you

Bing has been designated a very large online search engine under the European Digital Services Act since 25 April 2023, and article 39 obliges it to keep a public ad repository. That repository exists. We queried it.

And it covers the European Union and the European Economic Area only. The documentation answers the question directly: are ads from all countries available in the ad library? No, only ads delivered in the EU and EEA are included.

Which means the library is open to you and useless to you. Anyone in any country can search it, and an American or British advertiser who serves the European Union appears in it. But ads served only to an American or British audience are not there at all. If your competitors advertise only at home, this tool shows you nothing.

What it does expose, on a real ad we pulled through its public programmatic interface: the advertiser and its country of establishment, who paid if that differs, a representative copy with text, images and links, the first and last impression dates, an estimated reach as a range with a country breakdown, and general targeting criteria. The record we opened belonged to a British advertiser and was visible for one reason only: the ad had run in the Netherlands, where its impressions showed as a range of 25,000 to 50,000 and a country split of 100%.

What it does not expose: any cost, any spend, any billed clicks. And the targeting is shown as categories rather than values, so you learn that location was used as an exclusion without learning which locations.

Two practical notes. An ad stays for one year after its last impression, so a dated record beats an occasional look. And the advertiser cannot opt out, competitors included, because this is a legal obligation rather than a product choice.

The pattern is now consistent across this series. TikTok’s library covers thirty-two countries and not the United States. LinkedIn’s shows impressions and targeting only for ads aimed at the European Union. This one covers the European Union and nothing else. Advertising transparency is a European product, and buying outside Europe means buying unobserved, in both directions.

What changed in October 2026

Worth a paragraph, because two of these change what you can measure.

The conversions API reached general availability. Server to server, working alongside the existing tag, and the stated purpose is to capture activity that browser limitations miss. For any account that lost measurement to consent defaults or browser restrictions, this is the first thing to look at.

Performance Max opened up. Age and gender targeting are now available to everyone, device targeting was announced as coming, audience exclusions entered open pilot, and search terms and auction insights reports became available, with a search-term landing page report from mid-November. Those reports matter more than they sound: until they existed, a Performance Max campaign on this channel was close to unreadable.

Campaign creation by AI now goes from a website and brand guidelines to a first Performance Max campaign, and messaging guidelines allow up to 40 instructions to steer AI-generated text.

And a disclosure feature appeared quietly. New documentation lets an advertiser declare that a piece of media was AI-generated and request a visible watermark. It carries the note that not everyone has this feature yet. If your creative pipeline uses generated imagery, this is where the declaration will live.

What does not hold up

“Bing has 38% of search.” That figure is Microsoft’s own, and its footnote dismantles it: Comscore qSearch, Explicit Core Search (custom), March 2023, United States, desktop traffic only. Wrong device, and more than three and a half years old. It is the single source of most of the exaggeration around this channel, and for an American reader it is worth knowing that the number was built from American data and is still not the number to use.

“Cost per click is 30 to 50% cheaper.” Unverifiable. Microsoft publishes no cost per click, absolute or comparative, as we set out in cost per click explained. The gaps in circulation come from agency panels citing each other, and the most frequently attributed one goes back to 2017. The bias is structural: advertisers who open a Microsoft account do so because their sector is less contested there, so what gets measured is a selection, not a market price. The sourced nuance in the other direction: Microsoft does claim a lower cost per click, but comparing its partner traffic to its own inventory, not comparing itself to Google.

“The audience is older and wealthier.” The only figure Microsoft still publishes on this is that 23% spend more online, sourced to March 2023, United States, desktop only. The versions in circulation contradict each other. What does hold, and it is enough, is the desktop against mobile gap, which is measured.

“There is less competition.” Plausible, never measured, and partly false in the other direction. The Google Ads import is native, promoted by the channel and heavily used, so on an ordinary commercial query you face largely the same advertisers running largely the same ads.

“Microsoft Advertising is a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act.” It is not. The Commission closed its market investigation on 12 February 2024 designating neither Bing, nor Edge, nor Microsoft Advertising. The EU General Court confirmed the Edge non-designation on 2 September 2026. LinkedIn is designated, which partly explains the targeting exclusion described above.

“There is an open European proceeding against Bing.” No. The official supervision list records only requests for information, including a binding decision of May 2024 on generative AI risks in Bing. No formal proceeding and no fine appear there.

“Running Microsoft Ads helps you show up in ChatGPT.” False, and it is the most expensive misconception on this channel. What determines presence in ChatGPT’s answers is a line in your robots.txt, and ChatGPT’s advertising is bought from OpenAI. We have set out both in the ChatGPT Ads file.

“Consent mode is recommended.” No, it is mandatory since 5 May 2025 for advertisers delivering in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, and the penalty is that conversion tracking and retargeting stop.

How we work on this

We come to this subject in three situations: a company sold this channel on its company targeting, a company sold it on the ChatGPT argument, and a company that opened an account by import and cannot read its numbers.

We check what the targeting actually reaches. If the sales argument was company and job-function targeting, the market list settles it in two minutes, and it is better to know that in week one than in month three.

We establish which surfaces the budget is actually running on. Copilot enrolment is automatic and unmeasurable, the partner list is unpublished, and there is no Microsoft-only setting. None of that is a reason to avoid the channel. All of it is a reason to size it deliberately.

We check the consent signal before anything else, because its failure mode is silent: you keep spending and stop measuring.

We go through the import line by line. Widened geography, attribution switched to last click, bid strategies reverted, demographics cut, and no tag placed. That list explains most accounts written off as producing nothing.

And we read the published floors for what they are. There is no financial barrier to opening this account. The real constraint is the conversion volume needed before anything becomes readable.

Where to start

Open the market availability page and find your country. If company and job-function targeting was the reason you are here, that page settles it.

Check your consent signal is being sent if you deliver in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland. Its absence stops conversion tracking and retargeting, without an alert.

Add the logo extension. Without it, your search ads are not eligible for Copilot, where you are enrolled whether you like it or not.

Pull the publisher URL report and start excluding. It is the only visibility you have into an inventory whose composition is not published.

And if you imported from Google Ads, re-check your geographic targets first. A town can have become a region with no alert.