Semrush will stop tracking Microsoft Copilot in its enterprise AI search monitoring product on November 9, 2026, telling customers that recent changes to Copilot's access requirements prevent platforms such as its own from collecting the data needed. The notice went to Semrush Enterprise AIO customers by email on October 28 and became public today, when search consultant Glenn Gabe shared it on LinkedIn with the remark that "AI visibility tools are facing their own version of tracking issues."

In Short

Semrush sells a service that puts thousands of questions to AI chatbots and records which brands appear in the answers, and it has told customers it will stop doing this for Microsoft's Copilot on November 9. Microsoft has been tightening who can use Copilot, including a rule that people must sign in with an account, and Semrush says changes to Copilot's access rules stop tools like its own from collecting the answers. Companies that paid to watch how Copilot talks about them lose that view in Semrush, while tracking for ChatGPT, Gemini and the other chatbots it covers carries on.

What Semrush told customers

The notice is brief. Branded "Semrush, An Adobe Company", it concerns Enterprise AIO, Semrush's product for tracking AI visibility - how often brands appear in, and are cited by, the answers of AI assistants. It opens with a single sentence of explanation: "Recent changes to Microsoft Copilot's access requirements prevent AI visibility platforms, including Semrush Enterprise AIO, from collecting the data needed to track Copilot performance."

The consequence follows in the next paragraph. "Copilot tracking will therefore be discontinued on November 9," the notice states. "Tracking across other supported AI platforms will remain unaffected."

Gabe's post, published today, framed the matter in stronger terms than Semrush did. He wrote that Semrush "just emailed customers yesterday that Copilot visibility tracking will be discontinued as of 11/9 based on how Microsoft is preventing the tracking of Copilot data." He closed with a question aimed at the rest of the market: "I wonder when other platforms will inform customers."

That question has a basis in the notice itself. Semrush did not write that it had decided to stop covering Copilot. It wrote that the changes prevent AI visibility platforms, plural, from collecting the data - and placed its own product as one example of that group. Whether rival vendors face the same constraint, and whether they will say so, is not addressed.

The notice carries no date of its own. Gabe's post places its arrival on October 28. It does not name the Microsoft change it refers to, say when that change took effect, or say whether Copilot data collected in the weeks before November 9 has already been affected.

Two options for tracked prompts

Customers who were tracking prompts in Copilot are offered two paths. Under the first, the Copilot prompts are returned to the customer's overall balance, freeing that capacity for the platforms Semrush still covers. Under the second, the historical Copilot data is kept, but the prompts keep counting against the balance - even though no new Copilot data will arrive after November 9.

The choice, in other words, is between recovering capacity and preserving a record. Neither option is presented as the default. The notice directs customers to their Customer Success Manager to enable their preferred option or to raise questions, and gives no deadline for that decision.

Semrush does not publish Enterprise AIO prices. Its enterprise pricing page offers custom quotes and lists prompt tracking for the AI Optimization product as unlimited. The notice does not explain how a prompt balance relates to that description.

What changed at Microsoft

Semrush's wording - "access requirements" - points towards a series of changes Microsoft has made to who can use Copilot, and how, since the middle of 2026. Semrush has not tied its decision to any one of them.

Sign-in by default

The clearest written statement sits in Microsoft's Copilot Terms of Use for individuals, which took effect on August 18, 2026. They state that a Microsoft account is required to use Copilot, and their summary of changes records that Microsoft has clarified that users must be logged in with one. If someone logs in with a non-Microsoft account, Microsoft may create a Microsoft account for them automatically. The terms do not apply to people who sign in with a work, school or organisational Entra account; those users sit outside these terms.

Eleven days later a Microsoft product manager stated it outright. On August 29, Krishna Madhavan, principal product manager at Microsoft AI, Bing, wrote on X that Microsoft would, going forward, require all Copilot users to log in, according to Search Engine Roundtable, which reported the exchange on August 31. Madhavan is the same Microsoft product manager who announced in March a Bing Webmaster Tools feature mapping AI citations to the pages behind them.

The requirement has a boundary. Michael Schechter, Microsoft's corporate vice president for search growth and experiences, said in the same period that Copilot Search does not require sign-in, according to the same report. In practice, Search Engine Roundtable found that going directly to copilot.microsoft.com, or clicking the Copilot button on Bing's home page, produced a sign-in prompt, while Copilot Search answers inside ordinary Bing results could still be viewed without an account. When Microsoft launched Copilot Search in Bing in April 2025, no subscription or premium account was required.

The browser followed. On October 7, Search Engine Watch reported that Edge now tells users with unsigned profiles that they must sign in to use Copilot. Clicking the Copilot button in an unsigned profile opens a sign-in panel rather than the assistant, though the browser itself keeps working. The same report noted that signing in enables features such as memory and a more personalised Copilot.

There were earlier signals. A user on Microsoft's Tech Community forum reported on July 11, 2026 that Copilot's guest mode in Edge InPrivate on Android had started requiring sign-in; a second user replied on July 17 that the change appeared to affect all browsers. Neither post came from Microsoft, and neither was confirmed as an official change at the time.

Terms that rule out bots

The same terms address automated access directly. They bar the use of tools or computer programs, such as bots or scrapers, to access Copilot, and list bots and scrapers in the code of conduct next to technical attacks, under a heading about protecting Microsoft's ability to provide the service. The current text does not say whether that prohibition is new, so the August 18 version cannot be read as the moment the rule first appeared.

None of the Microsoft statements reported since August mentions third-party measurement tools. The sign-in requirement applies to every consumer user, and nothing in the public record shows that it was designed with visibility vendors in mind. Its effect on them is a separate matter.

Why a sign-in wall matters to trackers

Most AI visibility products work in the same way. A vendor builds a library of buyer-style prompts, sends them to AI platforms repeatedly, and parses the answers for brand names and cited links, rolling the results up into mention rates, citation rates and share-of-voice scores. The method depends on being able to put the same question to the same system, at scale, under conditions that do not change from one run to the next.

The industry's own measurement guidance recognises that access is the weak point. When the IAB published its framework in August, only 16% of brands systematically tracked AI visibility, according to the document. The framework groups collection into four architectures - active query simulation, passive observation of an opted-in panel, platform-native data and hybrids - and asks providers to disclose whether they rely on official APIs, licensed feeds, browser-based observation, user-permissioned panels, synthetic sessions or automated web scraping, and whether that method complies with platform terms, rate limits and access restrictions.

A requirement to log in cuts across the first of those architectures in two ways. Every session needs an account, and Microsoft's consumer terms tie Copilot use to a Microsoft account while separately prohibiting automated access. And a signed-in session is no longer a neutral baseline. Personal context such as memory can change what an assistant returns, which is the problem PPC Land described a year ago when personalisation features created an accuracy crisis for LLM tracking tools. In that case, ChatGPT was rewriting prompts using location, interests and past conversations, so tools querying from their own accounts could not reproduce what real users saw.

The Semrush notice does not describe how Enterprise AIO collected Copilot answers, or whether it relied on signed-out sessions. The timing is consistent with the sign-in requirement, but Semrush has not said that this is the change it means.

Copilot's place in Semrush's lineup

Copilot was a relatively late addition to the product. Semrush Enterprise unveiled its AI Optimization product in March 2025 and made it generally available on July 3, 2025, covering ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Mode across 16 countries and four languages, according to Semrush. Within weeks of launch, more than 30 enterprise customers had bought it, for nearly $1 million in annual recurring revenue, the company reported in August 2025.

Microsoft Copilot arrived on December 1, 2025. Semrush's announcement that day pitched the addition on Copilot's presence across work devices, personal computers and software, and described the result as a unified view of SEO and AI search performance that no other vendor provided - a company claim rather than an independent finding. It disclosed no Copilot-specific figures.

Semrush's enterprise pricing page now names nine tracked platforms for the AI Optimization product: ChatGPT, Google AI Overview, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, Grok, Gemini, Claude and DeepSeek. With Copilot gone, eight remain.

Semrush's flagship public research never depended on Copilot. The US edition of its AI Visibility Index in June, built on 126 million prompts collected from January to April 2026, covered ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Mode and AI Overviews. The October edition adding the UK used the same four platforms. The Copilot gap therefore falls on paying enterprise clients rather than on the published benchmarks.

Ownership adds context. Adobe agreed to acquire Semrush for $1.9 billion in November 2025, at $12 a share in cash, and completed the deal on April 28, 2026, according to Adobe. Adobe positioned Semrush within the brand visibility layer of its CX Enterprise system, alongside its own LLM Optimizer, which is why the notice carries the "An Adobe Company" line.

Microsoft's own reporting covers part of the gap

Microsoft does offer data about Copilot - on its own terms. Bing Webmaster Tools added an AI Performance dashboard in public preview on February 10, 2026, giving publishers a first look at how AI systems cite their content across Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and select partner integrations. It reports total citations, average cited pages, page-level citation activity and grounding queries - the phrases Microsoft's AI systems used to retrieve a site's content. Microsoft describes the data as a sample.

The dashboard has grown since. A mapping between grounding queries and cited pages arrived in March, and on October 13 a beta called Topics Portfolio began showing sites the AI search queries where rivals are cited and they are not, with figures Microsoft calls directional. Microsoft Clarity moved its Citations report to general availability in May, and in July Clarity added Topic Insights at no separate fee, a feature that overlaps with what paid visibility vendors sell.

These reports differ from what Semrush customers are losing. Microsoft's tools describe how a verified site's own pages were used as sources, through queries generated by Microsoft's systems. They do not show the prompts people typed, whether a brand was named in an answer without being cited, or how a brand fared against a list of prompts it chose itself. They also stop at Microsoft's own surfaces. Google's equivalent is narrower still: when Search Console's AI performance report reached every site on August 31, it showed impressions in AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover, but no clicks and no queries.

The result is a split that marketers already know from search. First-party data from the platform is authoritative but partial and limited to one owner's domain. Third-party data is comparable across platforms but exists only on the platforms' sufferance.

A familiar pattern from rank tracking

Gabe's phrase - AI visibility tools facing "their own version of tracking issues" - echoes a year of trouble for classic rank trackers, the software that queries search engines repeatedly to log where sites appear.

On September 14, 2025, Google removed the num=100 parameter that let tools retrieve 100 results in one request. Semrush described it at the time as an industry-wide problem affecting all rank tracking tools, and confirmed significant operational impact, with positions beyond the top 20 liable to fluctuate. In August 2026, Google began routing result links through redirect URLs, and Nozzle estimated that resolving one five-page ranking now takes 500 to 1,000 requests; Google cited technical measures against evolving forms of abuse. By October, Nozzle reported that Google was feeding rank trackers swapped results on 8% of pages collected since September 13. Google also sued SerpApi in December 2025 over scraping.

Microsoft took its own step away from open access to search data earlier. It retired the Bing Search APIs on August 11, 2025 and pointed developers to Grounding with Bing Search, which returns AI-generated answers rather than raw results and costs $35 per 1,000 transactions - between 40% and 483% more than the tiers it replaced.

There is a difference of degree. Google's changes raised the cost and lowered the reliability of rank tracking, but vendors kept collecting data. In Copilot's case, Semrush is saying it cannot collect the data at all.

What the notice leaves open

Several questions sit outside the text Semrush sent.

The first is scope. Copilot reaches users through copilot.microsoft.com, apps, Edge, Windows and Copilot Search inside Bing, and the last of those remained viewable without sign-in according to the August reporting. The notice does not say which surfaces Semrush tracked, or whether Copilot answers within Bing results were part of the product.

The second is data quality before the cut-off. The notice does not say when Semrush's Copilot collection was first affected, so it is unclear whether the historical data customers can keep runs cleanly up to November 9 or already contains a gap.

The third is the rest of the market. Several other visibility vendors market Copilot tracking. Gabe's question - when other platforms will inform customers - assumes they face the same limits; the notice's own language suggests the same. Neither establishes that every competitor is affected, since collection methods differ.

Why this matters for marketers

In traffic terms, Copilot is a small part of the AI assistant market. Similarweb data from May 2026 put Copilot at 2.0% of worldwide generative AI website traffic, a share that had barely moved in a year. Website visits, though, leave out Copilot's presence inside Windows, Edge and Microsoft 365. Microsoft also turned Copilot into a shopping surface in January, when it launched checkout inside Copilot with PayPal, Shopify and Stripe, so how products are described there has a direct commercial dimension for retailers.

The larger issue is comparability. Cross-platform share-of-voice figures are only as complete as the list of platforms behind them. When one assistant drops out of a vendor's dataset, the totals shift - not because brand visibility changed, but because the denominator did. Reports that blend platforms before and after November 9 will not be measuring the same thing.

The episode also shows where control over AI search measurement sits. Who gets to measure an AI assistant? Vendors choose their prompts and compute their own scores, and the IAB framework certifies none of them. What they cannot choose is access. A platform owner that requires sign-in, prohibits automated access and offers its own citation reports can determine which measurements exist, whether or not that is the purpose of the change.

For now, the practical effect is narrow and dated. From November 9, Semrush Enterprise AIO customers will see no new Copilot data, and each will have chosen - or will have to choose through their account manager - whether the old data is worth the balance it consumes.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Semrush, an Adobe company, and the customers of its Enterprise AI Optimization (AIO) product, with Microsoft as the owner of Copilot. The notice became public through a LinkedIn post by search consultant Glenn Gabe.

What: Semrush will discontinue Copilot visibility tracking, saying recent changes to Copilot's access requirements prevent AI visibility platforms from collecting the data needed. Customers can return their Copilot prompts to their overall balance or keep the historical data while the prompts continue to draw on that balance. Tracking for the other AI platforms Semrush supports continues. Semrush did not name the Microsoft change; Microsoft's consumer terms, effective August 18, 2026, require a Microsoft account and bar bots and scrapers, and a Microsoft product manager said on August 29 that all Copilot users would have to log in.

When: Semrush emailed customers on October 28, 2026. Gabe shared the notice today, October 29. Copilot tracking ends on November 9, 2026.

Where: Semrush Enterprise AIO, a product that lists nine tracked AI platforms on Semrush's pricing page and will track eight after the change. Microsoft's sign-in requirement applies to Copilot on copilot.microsoft.com and in Edge, while Copilot Search answers in Bing results remained viewable without sign-in according to August reporting.

Why: Semrush attributes the decision to Microsoft's access changes. For marketers, it removes one platform from a cross-platform measurement product, shifts share-of-voice comparisons that include Copilot, and leaves Microsoft's own citation reports in Bing Webmaster Tools and Clarity as the main source of Copilot data - reports that cover a site's citations, not brand mentions across chosen prompts. Whether other vendors face the same limits remains open.