Uncover Insights with Microsoft 365 Copilot: How to Conduct Audit Log and Content Searches

Microsoft 365 Copilot offers a range of capabilities to help you unlock insights and maintain compliance across your organization's digital landscape. Mastering audit log and content search capabilities is essential for any compliance or security professional responsible for governing Copilot usage in their environment.

Why Audit Copilot Activity?

As AI assistants become embedded in day-to-day workflows, organizations need visibility into how they are being used. Audit logs capture user interactions with Copilot — including prompts submitted and content accessed — giving compliance teams the evidence they need for regulatory reporting, incident investigation, and proactive risk management.

Audit Log Search for Copilot Prompts

Follow these steps to search audit logs for Copilot activity in the Microsoft Purview compliance portal:

1. Navigate to compliance.microsoft.com and sign in with an account that has audit permissions
2. In the left navigation, select Audit
3. If auditing is not yet enabled for your tenant, enable it from the Audit page before proceeding
4. Select New search and configure your date range and user filters
5. Under Activities, search for and select Interacted with Copilot
6. Click Search and wait for results to populate
7. Review individual records to see prompt details, timestamps, and the user who submitted each interaction

Content Search for Copilot Prompts

Content search provides a deeper investigation capability, allowing you to export Copilot interaction records for offline review:

1. Access compliance.microsoft.com and navigate to Content Search
2. Select New search to start a new investigation
3. Verify that your account has the required permissions — refer to the Microsoft Learn documentation for the Content Search role requirements
4. Choose your target locations (Exchange mailboxes, SharePoint sites) and specify the users you want to investigate
5. Under conditions, add a condition filtering by Type
6. From the expanded list of message types, select Copilot Interactions
7. Run the search and export the results as a PST file once complete
8. Open the exported PST file in Outlook to review individual interaction records in a familiar interface

Best Practices

• Retain audit logs — Ensure your audit log retention policy is set to an appropriate duration for your compliance requirements (minimum 90 days; up to 10 years with add-on licenses)
• Scope searches carefully — Target specific users or time ranges to reduce result volumes and focus investigations
• Integrate with Sentinel — Forward Copilot audit logs to Microsoft Sentinel for advanced threat hunting and automated alerting on anomalous AI usage
• Document your process — Maintain investigation documentation to demonstrate compliance during audits

Conclusion

These skills are crucial for any organization deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot. Proactive audit and content search capabilities allow compliance teams to detect policy violations early, respond to incidents efficiently, and demonstrate regulatory accountability. If you need assistance configuring Copilot governance for your organization, the AW InfraSec team is here to help.