What’s new in Microsoft 365 Copilot | October 2025

Seth_Patton​ With regards to Microsoft 365 Copilot Search...

Currently, the entire search experience is completely different for users with a Copilot license and without a Copilot license. I don't just mean the semantic search, Copilot summaries, etc. The entire UI is completely different.

• Non-Copilot licensed users see the old Search experience with Verticals at the top and Filters in a dropdown.
• Copilot licensed users see the new Copilot search experience with no Verticals, and Filters show on the right, with numbers of results for each filter type.

This is definitely not a unified search experience that we would expect from Microsoft. It makes our comms, adoption, training, etc. almost impossible.

Ideally, all users should have the same UI, but non-Copilot licensed users just don't have the Copilot Summary Overview or Copilot generated summaries for each of the search results. Otherwise, it should (needs) to be the same. We would also like to hope that the semantic (natural query) search would be available to all users regardless of Copilot license or not.

Do you have a timeframe of when this unified experience will happen?

On a similar topic, do you have any idea if the current SharePoint search experience has plans to be changed? We had a call with a Microsoft engineer the other day and they said from their internal research that their customers (us) don't utilize custom Verticals and Filters and there might be changes on the way. This is definitely not true - we have implemented custom Verticals/Filters across many parts of our business, and are continuing down this route, and worried that there will be an announcement in the near future that will completely change SharePoint Search.