Blog post
Understand how humans and AI engage with your brand with Microsoft Clarity
Microsoft Clarity is a free behavioral analytics tool that helps you understand whether your landing page is easy to navigate and understand. What makes it especially valuable in the AI era is its growing AI Visibility suite. This includes several tools to help you understand how AI understands and engages with your content including:
- AI bot crawler report
- Citation and grounding queries
- Share of authority
Clarity is a single tool showing the full journey regardless of source. It tells you how you’re being discovered by your customers (in AI where purchase decisions are being made or other sources). Additionally, Clarity tells you what happens on your website after the human or AI engages, and whether they're coming from AI, search, or an ad.
It can be easy to think of Clarity as "just" an SEO or AI visibility tool, but there’s real opportunity for paid media professionals as well. Here are a few areas where Clarity can help marketers:
- Landing page insights with privacy in mind: Understand whether your paid or organic landing pages are achieving their intended goal. This extends to understanding if conversion tracking, campaign targets, or creative are the underlying cause of lower performance landing pages/campaigns.
- Grounding queries versus search terms: Find real insights into whether your paid search budgets are being pulled into unintended auctions based on how AI understands your site, as well as unpacking new opportunities for targeting keywords or audiences.
- Competitive intelligence through topic insights: Get actionable intel on who’s eating into your organic citation share, how to solve it, and if there’s any overlap between your Auction Insights’ reported competitors.
- Exclude and target domains with confidence: because Clarity helps you understand the behavior analytics for each source coming to your site, you’ll be able to make more informed decisions on which domains you allow, and which get excluded.
Landing page insights with privacy in mind
One of the main reasons some marketers shy away from behavioral analytics tools is concern around privacy regulations. Microsoft Clarity supports privacy controls, masking options, consent management, and consent mode functionality helps businesses align their analytics implementation with regional privacy requirements.
Using Clarity, marketers can understand:
- Heatmap analysis: Find out where customers are spending time and where they may be getting stuck. Clarity visualizes clicks, scrolling behavior, and engagement patterns so you can see whether users are interacting with the elements you intended. For paid marketers, this can help you understand if creative choices are confusing or helpful on the path to conversion.
- Session recordings: Watch how users navigate your landing pages and identify friction points that traditional analytics reports often miss. Are visitors struggling to find a CTA? Abandoning forms? Scrolling past critical content? Session recordings help answer those questions. For paid marketers, this can help you troubleshoot if the lack of conversions is due to the traffic quality, landing page, or broken conversion tracking.
- Behavioral signals: Clarity automatically surfaces rage clicks, dead clicks, excessive scrolling, and other indicators that suggest a poor user experience. For paid marketers, this highlights the actions users are taking on your site and whether they understand the conversion path you’re laying out for them.
- A/B test validation: Beyond identifying a winning experience, Clarity can help explain why a variation outperformed another by showing how visitors behaved differently. For paid marketers, this is another testing lever in perfecting the path to conversion for your customers.
- Identify worthy/unworthy traffic segments: see how it behaves by traffic source, so they can understand how someone coming from an ad might behave differently than someone coming from AI and how to optimize differently.
This is particularly important for paid media teams because many performance issues blamed on targeting, bidding, or creative are actually landing page problems.
"Clarity takes the guesswork out of Generative Engine Optimization. Right now, we use the platform as a diagnostic tool to see which grounding queries trigger our content, and just as importantly, where competitors are outperforming us on citations. Moving forward, our plan is to scale this across our entire digital strategy by baking Clarity’s content suggestions directly into our editorial briefs. By using this data to refine our formatting, improve our information density, and answer the exact prompts the LLMs are using, optimizing for AI becomes less of a guessing game."
— Heidi Sturrock, Search Marketing Advisor
When search term visibility decreases on non-Microsoft ad platforms, audience signals become more critical. Campaign management leans more heavily on educated guesses pre-click, and, post-click experience becomes one of the few variables marketers fully control. Clarity helps make that part of the customer journey visible.
Grounding queries versus search terms
Paid search marketers live and breathe search terms.
We use them to understand intent, identify opportunities, and inform content and campaign strategies. Microsoft Advertising supports full search term transparency for any query resulting in a click.
However, AI-powered discovery introduces a new concept marketers need to understand: grounding queries.
A search term is what a human types. A grounding query is the simplified retrieval query an AI system uses when finding information to help generate an answer.
Think about what happens when someone asks an AI assistant: "What's the best CRM for a mid-sized B2B company with a long sales cycle?"
The AI system may translate that request into several retrieval queries before generating its response.
"What a useful new set of AI search focused reports within Microsoft Clarity with actionable insights to help us understand our AI search visibility, citations, market share and content optimization opportunities! With these new AI dashboards, Clarity has become the new must to install analytics platform across all my sites and position itself as the best top free provider of AI search data."
— Aleyda Solis, International SEO Consultant & Founder, Orainti
Historically, marketers have been largely blind to this layer of discovery. We could see rankings. We could see clicks. We could sometimes see search queries depending on whether we’re using Microsoft or not.
What we couldn't see was how AI systems interpreted and retrieved information before generating an answer.
This is where Clarity becomes uniquely interesting.
The AI Visibility reporting experience helps marketers understand which grounding queries are associated with their citations and content visibility. In other words, you can begin understanding how AI systems connect your content to specific topics and questions.
For PPC practitioners, this creates opportunities well beyond SEO.
Grounding queries can
- Surface emerging customer language.
- Reveal new ways AI systems classify your products or services.
- Highlight content gaps between how customers search and how AI interprets your expertise.
- Provide additional context when you're trying to understand demand that isn't fully reflected in traditional search term reports.
Grounding queries aren't a replacement for search terms. Instead, in the same way search term reports once gave marketers unprecedented insight into customer intent, grounding query visibility offers a new, additional signal into how AI systems understand and retrieve information.
If you see a lot of overlap between your grounding queries and your keywords/search terms, then you're likely being included in the right AI conversations. If there's not as much overlap, then there's a real possibility your language choices could be pulling you into irrelevant conversations.
Test your lading pages and organic site in the PMax campaign builder to see if you agree with the headlines, descriptions, and images it comes up with. If you don't, then there's a real possibility your grounding queries and subsquent citations won't be as relevant to your business.
Competitive intelligence through citation visibility
One of the biggest challenges marketers face today is understanding visibility in AI-generated experiences.
The Clarity AI Visibility dashboard allows marketers to understand when their content is being cited, which pages are receiving citations, and how their visibility compares to competing domains within shared citation contexts.
This creates a fundamentally different type of competitive intelligence.
"For years, visibility meant ranking in a list of links. Clarity's AI Visibility reframes that entirely. What matters now is whether AI systems are retrieving, grounding, and citing your content before a human ever searches. Share of Authority is the metric our clients have needed and didn't have a name for. Now they do."
— Simon Poulton, EVP Innovation & Growth, Tinuiti
Instead of asking, "Where do I rank in relation to my competitors?"
You can begin asking, "When AI systems answer questions related to my business, how often am I part of the answer?"
That's an important distinction.
As AI-generated answers become a more prominent part of the discovery process, success increasingly depends on being both found and selected.
Clarity's reporting can help identify
- Topics where your brand is frequently cited.
- Areas where competitors are being selected instead.
- Pages that are driving AI visibility.
- Opportunities to strengthen content in areas where your authority is weaker.
For paid media teams, this intelligence can also inform investment decisions.
If you discover your brand consistently earns authority and citations around a specific topic, that may support more aggressive media investment in adjacent campaigns. Conversely, if competitors dominate a topic where you're largely absent, that may signal a need for both content and advertising investment.
"I'm excited for the new AI Visibility metric to give us feedback on what entities AI believes you are an authority on. Microsoft is leading the way in transparency in how you are being understood. This data, with known entities in your content, give you a full picture of what you are known for."
— Martha van Berkel, CEO, Schema App
Why paid media teams should care about Clarity
The line between brand, SEO, content, and paid media continues to blur.
Modern marketers are being asked to optimize for more than clicks. Discoverability across human and AI-powered journeys is a critical part of winning in both paid and organic efforts.
Clarity helps bridge those worlds.
It shows what happens after the click through behavioral analytics. It helps uncover how AI systems discover and cite your content through AI Visibility. And because it's free, it lowers the barrier to gaining insights that previously required multiple specialized tools.
In a world where marketers are losing visibility into some parts of the customer journey and gaining new forms of AI-driven discovery, the winners will be the teams that embrace both realities.
Understand how humans and AI engage with your brand together by getting started with Clarity.
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