Forum Discussion
BCE Require Bing Ads to be enabled in Edge
Since the release of BCE, we have struggled with enterprise users being unable to access the BCE web interface from within MS Edge for Business on their company Windows laptop. The users were repeatedly presented with the welcome Bing Chat splash screen. BCE, however, worked fine everywhere else: within Edge Sidebar, Chrome, iOS (Edge/Bing)... just not on their local Windows PC.
After many tests, we were finally able to identify the exact cause of this issue. Since we've never seen this mentioned explicitly in Microsoft documentation or other forums, I thought I would post it here to help others facing the same challenge.
- We currently have a policy (GPO/Intune) that disables ads for Bing.
- The exact setting configured is: BingAdsSuppression=True.
- When this is set to True, enterprise users cannot access BCE from MS Edge with their work account (although, bizarrely, it works if logged into Bing with both a consumer Microsoft account AND a work account).
Conclusion: If you encounter an issue with accessing BCE within MS Edge, ensure, as part of your troubleshooting steps, that your company does not have a policy in place that disables Bing Ads.
I hope this helps someone
Update: As of September 25th, this behavior seams to have been fixed by Microsoft. BCE do not require the MS Edge Policy "BingAdsSuppression" to be disabled anymore.
- great catch. we saw this too. Hopefully the Edge team sees this as a bug.
- Exactly, I also hope this is not the intended behavior and that MS will consider this a bug and correct it.
There is currently a new wave of attack using Search Services Ads to deceive a user into clicking a malicious link that is displayed above legitimate search results. Our security team is not really keen at removing these protection mechanism to allow BCE to work, in fact they are moving into the opposites direction trying to find ways to limit Ads within the enterprise to reduce the exposure.
Update: As of September 25th, this behavior seams to have been fixed by Microsoft. BCE do not require the MS Edge Policy "BingAdsSuppression" to be disabled anymore.
MickaelLap With Bing Ad Suppression enabled what is the user experience in Copilot? I noticed recently within the last week that Copilot now has very large obnoxious ads being displayed. I would love to be able to suppress these by enabling this setting.
My understanding is that the "BingAdsSuppression" configuration setting has no effect on Copilot Ads; it specifically targets certain ads within the Bing Search Results feed in the MS Edge Browser. Currently, the management options for Copilot are quite limited. Primarily, you can control the behavior of the MS Edge Copilot Side panel, including disabling it or allowing access to PDFs, among other settings. Even if there was a policy setting for MS Edge, it would not be applicable for users utilizing other browsers, such as Chrome. Ideally, there should be a Microsoft 365 tenant-wide Bing/Copilot administration setting to address this, though I am not aware of any plans by Microsoft to introduce such a feature
