Microsoft Clarity New AI Citations Report

Microsoft, not to be outdone by Google, added AI citations to Microsoft Clarity, its web analytics tool. This report shows how your content is referenced in AI-generated answers.

Microsoft announced, “With this release, Citations in Microsoft Clarity moves into general availability with those refinements incorporated into the product. The core goal remains unchanged: helping site owners better understand how their content participates in AI-generated experiences and how that visibility evolves over time.”

Here is a screenshot of the report:

To view the Citation dashboard, select AI Visibility and then Citation from the dropdown menu.

The Citation dashboard tracks citation activity in AI-generated answers only. It does not measure traditional search rankings, impressions, or click-through rates. Instead, it captures a new layer of influence—one that occurs before a user visits your site, inside the AI experience itself. “Citation counts reflect how often a page was referenced, not its ranking or prominence within an AI-generated answer,” Microsoft added.

Here is what it does show:

• Page citations: The total number of times pages from your domain were referenced in AI-generated answers during the selected time period, including multiple citations within the same answer.
• Share of authority: A competitive view showing the percentage of total citations attributed to your domain compared to other cited domains within the same set of queries where your domain appeared.
• AI referral traffic: The percentage of sessions on your site originating from AI assistants during the selected time period, calculated as AI-referred sessions divided by total sessions.
• Queries: The queries used by AI systems to retrieve and evaluate your content before generating an answer, helping you understand how AI systems interpret user intent and connect it to your content.
• My cited pages: A page-level view showing which URLs from your domain were cited in AI-generated answers, along with citation counts and associated grounding queries. This helps identify which content is most frequently selected as a trusted source by AI systems.
• Trendlines: With trendlines for cited pages and queries, you can analyze how activity changes over time as content evolves and AI query patterns shift.

Forum discussion at LinkedIn.