Developers have alleged that Copilot ads are showing up in GitHub pull requests. However, Microsoft has denied the reports and told Windows Latest that it does not plan to show ads on GitHub. As for alleged Copilot-generated ads on GitHub, the company says it was a bug, and not an intentional move.

Thousands of pull requests on GitHub appear to include a Copilot-generated product tip, which looks more like an advertisement than anything else. This came to our attention when Zach Manson, a software developer based in Melbourne, spotted a Copilot-generated ad or suggestion in his project’s pull request on March 30.

This Copilot ad showed up after a team member in Zach’s project requested Copilot in GitHub to correct an error in a pull request. And that’s not an expected behaviour.

GitHub’s Copilot integration is actually quite helpful, and developers use it frequently, especially if they want to clean up their pull requests. But to Zach’s surprise, GitHub inserted a small ad for Copilot’s agentic features and Raycast, which is a popular third-party search tool on macOS and Windows.

“This is horrific. I knew this kind of bull**** would happen eventually, but I didn’t expect it so soon,” Manson wrote in a post.

Since the post went viral on Hacker News, Raycast developers have denied entering into an ad arrangement with Microsoft.

Microsoft says GitHub won’t include ads, and Copilot’s ad-like pull request note was just a bug

In a statement, Microsoft told Windows Latest that GitHub was not testing ads in pull requests.

Instead, the company said a bug caused existing Copilot product tips, including one referencing Raycast, to appear in the wrong place.

According to Microsoft, these tips were originally meant only for pull requests created by Copilot, but the bug made them show up in some human-created pull requests as well when Copilot was invoked to edit code.

“GitHub does not and does not plan to include advertisements in GitHub,” says Martin Woodward, VP of Developer Relations at GitHub, in a statement to Windows Latest. “We identified a programming logic issue with a GitHub Copilot coding agent tip that surfaced in the wrong context within a pull request comment. We have removed agent tips from pull request comments moving forward.”

The original GitHub announcement from last week appears to support Microsoft’s explanation, at least in part.

GitHub had already said Copilot could be mentioned directly in pull requests to make changes, and also noted that Copilot previously opened its own pull requests on top of existing ones.

“Copilot would open a new pull request on top of your existing pull request, using the existing pull request’s branch as its base branch,” GitHub noted in a release notes update on March 24, 2026.

Microsoft sources also confirmed to Windows Latest that it was an unintentional behavior of GitHub’s new Copilot feature, which allows you to invite AI to make changes to pull requests.

When the company rolled out the feature, a product tip from the GitHub Copilot coding agent that included a third-party suggestion was inadvertently displayed in the main pull request comment when Copilot was called by a developer.

Microsoft identified this behavior as a programming logic issue and removed the agent tips feature from pull request comments.

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