Use the SharePoint Site Content Report to Highlight Issues – If You Can Find Any

As quickly as they can and in as many ways as possible, Microsoft is attempting to address the problem of digital rot in SharePoint Online. Having old, obsolete, inaccurate, and just plain wrong information in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business doesn’t matter so much until the eagle eye of AI tools are deployed. At that point, all manner of misleading responses can appear because the AI is grounded on misleading or incorrect information.

To some extent, customers cannot be blamed for the digital debris that they accrue in SharePoint Online. For years, Microsoft has encouraged cloud storage (the latest tactic is a policy setting to block users from saving to non-cloud locations), so it’s natural that some rot accumulates along with valuable material. As I’ve said before, many of the problems customers have encountered with Microsoft 365 Copilot deployments are the legacy of previous Microsoft collaboration strategies. Not everyone goes through the process of auditing the files stored in SharePoint Online to remove dross (here’s how to create a report of files in a document library, and here’s how to do the same for a OneDrive for Business account).

The Site Content and Policy Comparison Report

All of which brings me to the “SharePoint AI-powered site content and policy comparison report” announced in MC1143287 (27 August 2025). The report is available to tenants with Microsoft 365 Copilot or SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM) licenses. It’s one of the SAM features made available to Copilot customers without the need for SAM licenses. The site content and policy comparison report is rolling out in general availability now with completion worldwide due in late December 2025.

According to Microsoft, the idea is that a tenant selects a reference site that they regard as a good example of a site with “up-to-date and relevant policies” to use as a benchmark to compare up to 10,000 other sites against (Figure 1). In addition to policies that apply to the site (like data lifecycle policies), the reference site should contain more than 10 files of the same kind of material that’s found in the target sites. This is because the comparison uses the 10 most recently used files from each site.

The report uses AI to examine the target sites. The target sites can be chosen by uploading a CSV containing their URLs or selected using several site properties, ranging from the simplest (examine everything as shown in Figure 2) to identifying sites based on the container management sensitivity label assigned to sites, the site type, creation date (for example, sites created within the last 30 days), sites with no owners, and sites where external sharing is disabled.

Nothing in My Reports

Behind the scenes, AI compares the target sites against the reference site to highlight inconsistent application of policies based on the similarity between the reference site and target sites (here’s the documentation). After pondering on any anomalies that it finds (a process that Microsoft warns could take up to 48 hours), the AI generates a report for administrators to consider and potentially act upon.

And that’s where my story ends because despite multiple attempts to select a good reference site to compare against the other sites in my tenant, the AI always came up with an empty report. I even purposely populated a site with content that I knew is similar to other sites and edited ten of the files added to the site to make sure that fresh material was available for the comparison. The site had the same sensitivity label and settings as the reference site, but the report still ignored it.

Maybe my SharePoint Deployment Has No Problems

I could take a positive view and conclude that the AI discovered no irregularities. For instance, all my team sites have container management labels and have assigned retention policies. It could also be the case that the selected reference sites are very dissimilar to the other sites in the organization, so much so that none of the other sites came close enough to be of interest.

However, I suspect that the AI comparison just doesn’t work well for tenants where many similar sites exist but only a few of those sites are actively used. I also wonder why Microsoft insists on comparing the last ten most recently used files because if the intention is to help organizations prepare for Copilot, then perhaps sites that hold many files without having sufficient recently modified files should be highlighted? After all, in the eyes of AI tools, a file is a file, and the information contained in a file that hasn’t been modified in years could end up being cited in a Copilot response. Using old material often leads to poor responses.

Don’t assume that just because it didn’t work for me, the site content and policy comparison report is rubbish. It might work well in your tenant and highlight many areas that you should investigate to improve the tenant readiness for AI.

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