Microsoft Clarity now splits AI citations into branded and non-branded

Clarity added branded and non-branded filters to its AI Citations dashboard on 3 August 2026. The split helps distinguish searches that already name a business from searches about its category. Keep the dataset’s scope visible: these citation records concern Microsoft’s AI surfaces.

The search behind the answer

You ask Copilot: which travel insurance covers off-piste skiing?

Copilot can turn that question into search phrases such as “off-piste ski insurance” or “winter sports policy exclusions”. It searches those phrases, reads the results and uses them to write an answer. These assistant-generated searches are called grounding queries.

They are not necessarily all exposed in the answer interface. They don’t show up in Google Analytics either, because the assistant did the browsing, not a human.

Clarity’s AI Citations dashboard is unusual because it exposes them. Instead of guessing why your page appeared in an answer, you get the actual phrase Copilot searched for before it quoted you. Search Engine Journal’s walkthrough of the feature describes one site with over 36,000 recorded citations traced back to 147 distinct grounding queries.

What shipped on August 3

Four changes, all inside the existing AI Visibility dashboard, per Microsoft’s own post:

• Individual queries now carry a branded label.
• Share of Authority, Clarity’s measure of how strongly you feature in the answers, is broken out branded versus non-branded.
• Dashboard filters apply the split across the rest of the reporting.
• Brand-led demand is separated from generic discovery.

It’s free, and it’s the third Clarity release in under a month. PPC Land counted them: Topic Insights on 9 July, Query Topics in beta on 22 July, this on 3 August. Citations itself only reached general availability on 13 May. The filters add context to the citation count.

Why the split is the interesting part

Two citations can represent different kinds of search.

If Copilot searched “Preferium pricing” and quoted our pricing page, that is not discovery. Somebody — or some model — already had the name. If it searched “white-label AI SEO platform” and quoted us, the retrieval query did not require our brand name. The first number tells you your brand is legible. The second gives evidence of visibility on a broader query.

Lumped together, the second gets flattered by the first. In the sample PPC Land published, 43% of citations came from branded queries, and the two highest Share of Authority rows were both branded — 24.2% and 22.3%, against 20.3%, 18.6% and 15.9% for the rest. A single blended “authority” figure in that dataset would be carried by the brand’s own name.

This relates to the research on model memory, which found assistants disproportionately search for brands they already recognise. If the model is biased toward looking you up by name, a branded query may reflect the model’s choice, not just a name typed by the original user.

The limit you have to write on the report

Clarity’s Citations data reflects Microsoft’s AI surfaces. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and Perplexity don’t hand Microsoft their internal grounding logs, so nothing in that dashboard tells you how ChatGPT cited you.

Search Engine Journal’s case study makes the skew concrete: of those 147 grounding queries, Bing ranked the site for all but six. Google ranked it for none of them. The queries themselves are Bing-shaped.

There is a separate part of Clarity that does name ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity — the AI referral traffic channel. That’s people clicking a link in an answer and landing on your site. Useful, and a different thing from being cited: one counts visits, the other counts appearances in an answer the reader may never click out of. Don’t let the two blur together in a client deck.

Using the split in a report

If Clarity is already part of the client’s approved analytics setup, record a baseline and check the available date range. Do not assume that a new report includes historical data.

Compare the non-branded grounding queries with the questions the client wants to answer. They show how the assistant searched for the topic and can help identify gaps in the site’s content.

Label the report “Copilot and Bing citations” so its coverage is clear. Measure other assistants separately before presenting a broader AI-visibility result.