Dynamics 365 Business Central: prepare your extensions to support the Copilot Chat.

Every Microsoft product now has an integrated “Copilot” on it and Dynamics 365 Business Central follows this road too.

The integrated Copilot Chat is the next evolution in how users interact with Business Central. With the Copilot Chat you can use natural language to get help, explore data, and generate new insights from your ERP data. It turns Business Central into a conversational experience, where users can find what they need simply by asking questions to the AI in their natural language.

With Dynamics 365 Business Central 2025 Wave 2 release (version 27) Microsoft introduces the support for third-party content in Copilot Chat.

This means that now Copilot can answer questions from your online content. To do that, Copilot Chat uses RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) to answer questions, directly referencing content found online.

How can Copilot retrieve your online content?

Copilot can now retrieve your online content using Bing Search, starting from the URL you provided in your extension’s. More specifically, it checks the Help property in the app.json file of your extensions and then it performs a Bing keyword search based on the user’s intent.

Bing Search capability must be enabled in the Copilot & agent capabilities page:

Then, Copilot selects the most relevant Bing results, verifies that the answer is grounded (this means the answer comes directly from the search results, preventing LLM hallucinations) and it runs quality assurance checks, ensuring the answer is safe and verifiable.

The retrieved content will appear in Copilot Chat with link and citations (a new UI element will show your extension’s icon):

All the search results are clearly marked as third-party content, provided by Bing.

Under the hood, Copilot Chat performs a Bing Search API query to the site listed in the help field of your extension’s app.json file. The query uses Bing Search API (https://api.bing.microsoft.com/v7.0/search) and to limit results to a specific domain, it uses the site: operator (q=yourQuestion+site:demiliani.com). 

Integrating with Bing makes your content discoverable across all Microsoft Copilot experiences, including Dynamics 365 Business Central and M365 Chat. You don’t need to build infrastructure to index and serve your content and you benefit from Microsoft’s world-class privacy, compliance, and security standards, built into every Microsoft product and service

Preparing your extensions to support Copilot Chat.

To prepare your AL extensions to support the new Copilot Chat search capabilities, you need to add your extension’s website url into the help parameter in the app.json file:

Be aware that the url you place in this tag must be publicly accessible and indexed by Bing Search (it must be an https url of a site you own).
Copilot Chat will not be able to see your content if your site:

• is hidden from search engines
• does not appear in Bing search
• is behing a protected page (login etc.)

Don’t use URL shorteners and redirects (these creates problems). Remember also that URLs will be truncated to 2 path-level deeps. Just to explain this with an example:

• https://www.yoursite.com is OK (0-level deep)
• https://www.yoursite.com/en-us/ is OK (1-level deep)
• https://www.yoursite.com/en-us/docs is OK (2-level deep)
• https://www.yoursite.com/en-us/docs/userguide is NOT OK (3-level deep)

In this last case, if in your app.json file you have help = https://www.yoursite.com/en-us/docs/userguide the Copilot Chat will truncate it to https://www.yoursite.com/en-us/docs/ .

Remember also that if you have help = https://www.yoursite.com/en-us/docs the Copilot Chat will NOT index the following paths:

• https://www.yoursite.com (this is an higher level than what you have specified)
• https://www.yoursite.com/manuals (this is a different path than what you have specified)

Another aspect to remember is that if you have APP1 installed in a tenant, if in this app you have help = https://www.yoursite.com/en-us/docs and if in this DOCS folder you have content related to APP1 and APP2, Copilot will index both contents, so users of APP1 will see also results related to APP2, also if this app is not installed (so you should avoid that situation).

Supported contents for Copilot Chat

The Copilot Char search capability supports the following contents:

• Text files
• HTML files
• Markdown files
• PDFs (with some limitations)

The following contents are not supported:

• Images
• Videos
• Flash websites (if they still exists)
• Other file types

In order to better index your documents, you should apply all the SEO best practices to your pages, like:

• Create short pages, maybe with a text-based content (HTML, Markdown etc).
• Break your content into pages covering specific topics.
• Add metadata to improve discovery, indexing and ranking.
• Use semantic markup to help Bing understand your content

Bing recommends using the following types of semantic markup:

• HTML5 Semantic Elements: Use tags like <header>, <nav>, <main>, <section>, <article>, <footer>, and <time> to define the structure and hierarchy of your page.
• Schema.org Structured Data: Bing, along with Google and Yahoo, is a founding supporter of Schema.org.
  • Format: JSON-LD is the preferred format, though Microdata and RDFa are also supported.
  • Common Types: Implement relevant schema types such as Product, FAQPage, Review, HowTo, and Event.
  • Connected Schema: Focus on defining relationships between content using properties defined in Schema.org to build a “Semantically Enhanced Web”. 

You can verify the implementation of your markup using the URL Inspection tool within Bing Webmaster Tools. 

You can also manually verify the Bing Search indexing going to Bing.com and typing the following: site://YOURSITEURL

where YOURSITEURL is the url you have in the extension’s app.json file in the help tag.

Here is an example of results:

If Bing says you that there are no results, than there’s a problem to address…

You can also test your url for relevant keywords like in the following example:

These are some manual tests that can help on discovering what is indexed.

Remember that Bing decides how often to index your content based on its own metrics.
Indexing can take place anywhere from an hour, to a few days. You can configure this in the Bing Webmaster Tools.

What about costs?

Copilot Chat is FREE to use for all users with a valid Business Central license. Copilot Chat integrates seamlessly with third-party content, with no additional cost to customers or partners.

The Copilot Chat can be controlled (so enabled or disabled) from the Copilot & agent capabilities page, so you’re always in control. In this page, if you opt-out of Bing Search (switch it to OFF), you can still use Copilot Chat (but without context indexing).

Microsoft doesn’t store the intent of any Copilot Chat or any third-party content. You can exclude content from Bing using standard practices (like robots.txt, a file that informs search engine crawlers which pages and files the crawler can or cannot access on your site) or via the Bing Webmaster Tools.

Original Post https://demiliani.com/2025/12/04/dynamics-365-business-central-prepare-your-extensions-to-support-the-copilot-chat/