Copilot studio Agents published on Sharepoint

Yes, your understanding is spot on, and it's a frustration many people run into.

When you publish a Copilot Studio agent to a SharePoint site, it shows up as an embedded chat widget. That widget only remembers the current conversation, so the moment a user navigates away or refreshes the page, everything is gone. There is no history panel, no way for the user to scroll back to what they asked last week. It just starts fresh every time.

The built-in SharePoint agents work differently because they are actually powered by the Microsoft 365 Copilot infrastructure. That means they live inside the Copilot chat experience, which does keep threads alive and lets users come back to previous conversations. It is not that Microsoft built a special history feature for them. It is simply that they run in a completely different environment that already has persistence baked in.

There is a Memory feature in Copilot Studio that is currently in preview, and it is worth knowing about, but it is not the same thing. It lets the agent remember things about a user over time, like preferences or past context, but it does not give users a visible chat history they can scroll through.

If showing previous conversations to users is important for your scenario, the most realistic paths are either moving toward a declarative agent approach so it runs inside M365 Copilot and gets that persistence for free, or building a custom solution where you store conversations externally and surface them in your own way. Neither is trivial, but the declarative agent route is probably the faster one if your agent does not rely on anything too complex in Copilot Studio.