Microsoft Clarity Now Separates Branded And Non-Branded AI Citations via @sejournal, @slobodanmanic
Webinar How Freshpet Earned AI's Trust The GEO playbook behind Freshpet's AI Overview citations, plus checks to run on your own brand. Free, live Aug 20. Webinar Google Local Services Ads Are Moving To PMax: What To Check First Prepare for Google's LSA move into Performance Max with a before-and-after audit checklist from CallRail. Webinar SEJ Live: The AI Search Playbook June 17 | AI visibility, social citation signals, and multi-channel attribution — three sessions, live Q&A. Webinar How Freshpet Earned AI's Trust The GEO playbook behind Freshpet's AI Overview citations, plus checks to run on your own brand. Free, live Aug 20. Webinar New AI Search & SEO KPIs: 4 Real Signals AI mentions and citations are benchmarks, not decisions. Get 4 traffic-predictive signals drawn from real bot data across hundreds of sites. 🔥[Live 8/12 with Loren Baker] Ecommerce SEO: Own your "brand +promo code" search. Microsoft Clarity now splits branded and non-branded AI citations. Learn how marketers can measure AI visibility, authority, traffic, and business impact. Slobodan Manic 5 seconds ago ⋅ 7 min read Slobodan Manic Founder of No Hacks and machine-first website optimisation consultant at No Hacks Bio Follow Microsoft Clarity has added branded and non-branded query labels, filters, and Share of Authority breakdowns to its AI Citations dashboard. The August 3 update helps marketers answer a basic question: Did an AI system look for your brand by name, or did it find your content while researching a broader topic? Until now, marketers could review grounding queries one at a time. The new filters make it easier to measure and compare the two groups. That gives chief marketing officers a clearer picture of where their AI visibility comes from and where competitors may have an edge. Microsoft defines Share of Authority as the percentage of citations attributed to your domain compared with other cited domains. There is an important detail behind that number. Microsoft calculates it daily and includes a query-day when your domain received a citation. The comparison covers citations from all domains within those included queries. In plain English, Share of Authority shows how much visibility you earned in the queries where your domain appeared. It does not represent your share of the entire AI search market. Clarity is free. Before viewing citation data, a project administrator must verify the domain using the Clarity tracking code, Google Search Console, or Bing Webmaster Tools. A grounding query is a search an AI system uses to find web content before generating an answer. These queries can differ from the words a person typed. They show what the AI searched for behind the scenes. A branded grounding query refers directly to your company or brand. These citations show that your brand entered the AI system’s research process. They can also reveal whether the system uses your website as a source or depends more heavily on third-party publishers. A high branded Share of Authority means your domain earned a large portion of the citations within the included branded queries. A non-branded query covers a broader topic without referring directly to your brand. A citation from this group means your content appeared while the AI system researched a category, problem, or use case. For marketers, non-branded Share of Authority can be a useful competitive signal. It shows how often your content earns citations alongside other sources covering the same topics. Branded citations show where your brand enters AI research. Non-branded citations show where your expertise enters the wider conversation. The branded label applies to the AI system’s grounding query. It may say something different from the user’s original prompt. “Which tools can help me understand how visitors use my website?” The AI system could then search for several products by name. Clarity would classify those searches as branded, even though the user did not mention a brand. This distinction matters because the data cannot prove what the user knew or intended. A branded grounding query may show that the AI selected a company for further research. A non-branded query may show that the system was exploring a broader topic. Neither one confirms the customer’s awareness, buying stage, or likelihood to purchase. Marketers should describe this data as AI retrieval behavior. Understanding customer intent requires other evidence, such as referral traffic, website behavior, surveys, sales conversations, and conversions. Clarity tracks citations separately from AI referral traffic. A page citation records how often an AI-generated answer referenced a page during the selected period. Microsoft says citation counts do not show where a source ranked or how prominently it appeared in the answer. AI referral traffic measures the percentage of website sessions that came from AI assistants. A page can earn citations without receiving visits. The answer may give users everything they need, or the source link may be hard to see. Clarity provides citation and referral data. Measuring conversions and revenue requires your analytics, CRM, or attribution platform.
Source: Search Engine Journal
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