Microsoft Clarity Now Shows How AI Search Engines Are Reading Your Website - What That Means For Your Business

What Is Microsoft Clarity’s Citations Feature? 

Having moved from preview into general availability in May 2026, Citations shows whether, and how often, your website’s pages are being referenced in AI-generated answers; something no free tool has done before.  

Understanding grounding queries 

The main concept is the grounding query, which is the simplified search term that AI translates your customer’s question into before it goes off and retrieves facts from the web. Asking Copilot conversationally means that, behind the scenes, it converts your question into a much plainer search phrase in order to check the web for relevant pages; it then uses its findings to write the answer it gives. Citations show what these queries are, alongside the pages of yours that showed up for it.  

Setting up Microsoft Clarity 

Setting it up is actually quite simple: just install the standard Clarity tracking code, verify domain ownership through Bing Webmaster Tools or Google Search Console, and watch as the dashboard begins to show:  

• Page citations: how many times your pages were referenced in AI answers over a given period of time  

• Share of authority: your portion of citations compared with every other domain cited for the same queries 

• AI referral traffic: visits arriving specifically from AI-generated answers  

• Grounding queries: the exact search terms that prompted each citation  

• Cited pages: which of your website’s pages are actually doing the work  

This is one of the clearest pictures yet of how AI systems are actually using your content, and it’s free! It also requires no extra development work, making it something of a no-brainer.  

What Is Topic Insights, and How Does It Go Further? 

Citations tells you whether you’re being cited, but it doesn’t tell you why, or why you’re losing ground to competitors for that matter. This is where Topic Insights comes in.  

Hot off the press, this July 2026 upgrade groups individual queries into themes, with competitive analysis layered on top, instead of looking just at individual queries. This competitive analysis looks at 4 areas:  

• Visibility: how often you’re cited and your share of the authority  

• Influence: how much of the AI answer your content is responsible for 

• Competition: who is being cited alongside you and where they’re doing better 

• Opportunities: the content gaps to fill 

To illustrate how this feature works, Microsoft used a hypothetical running shoe brand as an example. The brand assumes its AI visibility comes from product pages and brand searches, but Topic Insights reveals competitors are actually winning citations from a different set of questions entirely. These include ‘which shoes suit marathon training’ or ‘how long do trainers last before they need replacing’. The brand shows up when the conversation is about speed and performance, but disappears the moment durability and injury prevention come up. Rankings would never show this content gap.  

Again, Microsoft has made Topic Insights free to every Clarity user, though it is still in beta and capped at ten reports per project per week. It’s worth testing it as an ongoing monitoring tool rather than a one-off audit.  

Why This Matters Even If Your Customers Don’t Use Bing 

Let’s be frank; this is a Microsoft product, so you’d be right to question whether the data is really just about Bing and Copilot, and therefore not much use to a business whose customers are using Google and ChatGPT. It’s true that the citation data Clarity collects is skewed towards Microsoft’s own AI platforms; Gemini, ChatGPT and Perplexity don’t share their internal grounding data with Microsoft.  

However, the patterns that the data reveals are still valuable: most AI systems retrieve information in a similar way, translating a question into a search style query, using it to pull web pages that they then use to generate an answer. A page that earns citations in Copilot is generally doing something right in a structural sense, such as using clear and direct answers, and organised content that’s easy for AI to lift and use.  

That said, some research suggests different AI models retrieve and prioritise content differently. Separate data from Semrush found that citation sets don’t overlap by much between AI platforms, which means that no single tool, including Clarity, can give you the complete picture. 

Our advice is to use these Microsoft features as a useful experiment, and an insight into how AI systems read and use content; not as a definitive tool for AI visibility.  

Why AI Traffic Is Worth the Effort 

Even with the caveats, it’s still commercially wise to pay attention to AI traffic. Microsoft’s own figures suggest that traffic arriving from AI-generated answers converts at roughly three times the rate of other channels. So yes, it accounts for a small slice of traffic at the moment, but it’s a disproportionately valuable one, and growing so, so fast.  

What Businesses Should Actually Do With This Data 

Practical steps for most SMEs and startups are relatively straightforward:  

Set clarity up properly  

Do this if you haven’t already, and complete domain verification through Bing Webmaster Tools or Google Search Console so Citations reporting becomes available. 

Check your grounding queries and Topic Insights 

Regular monitoring will help you spot where competitors are being cited on questions your content doesn’t currently answer.  

Restructure key pages for clarity  

Direct answers should go near the top, and be supported by bullet points and tables; this is what AI systems tend to favour when they choose what to take and cite.  

Treat the dashboard as a discovery tool 

The data is still in beta, and it’s still weighted towards Bing, so whilst it is something of an eye-opener, use it alongside your existing SEO reports rather than taking it as gospel.  

How 427 Marketing Can Help 

AI visibility is so new, and it’s easy to get bamboozled by dashboards full of unfamiliar metrics without a clear plan for what to do with them. Our team can help interpret what these new Clarity features are telling you, as well as closing the gaps that it uncovers. Structuring your website so it earns visibility across AI-generated answers as well as traditional search results is what we’re here to do.  

If you’d like a hand making sense of your own AI visibility data, get in touch with us.