AI-driven experiences have quickly changed what it means to be “discoverable.”
With zero-click AI experiences, your content may shape how questions are answered, definitions are formed, and recommendations are made without appearing in your traffic reports or traditional search consoles. That visibility gap is one Bing Webmaster Tools is beginning to close, leading the shift toward measurable AI citation visibility.
Influence now happens upstream of visits, as AI-generated experiences summarize information before a user decides whether to visit a site. For publishers and brands, this creates a new kind of uncertainty. Their content strategy may be working, but the evidence is harder to see.
AI Citations in Microsoft Clarity unifies signals across Bing Webmaster Tools and Clarity to deliver end-to-end visibility across the AI ecosystem, from bot crawling and indexing to how your content is cited in AI-generated answers and drives AI-referred traffic to your site. This release marks an early step toward Generative Engine Optimization tooling within Clarity, helping brands and publishers understand how their content participates in AI-driven experiences.
AI Citations is currently in limited preview by invitation. Interested brands and publishers can request access.
Grounding: The Infrastructure Behind AI Answers
Behind many AI-generated experiences is grounding, the technology that connects generative models to current, authoritative information on the web. Rather than relying solely on pre-trained knowledge, grounded AI systems retrieve and incorporate up-to-date content to generate accurate, relevant answers.
Microsoft grounding builds on decades of search expertise through Bing. It powers both Microsoft AI experiences and partner AI platforms that rely on Bing to retrieve and ground information.
Understanding how your content participates in this grounded ecosystem is essential to measuring influence in an AI-first world.
Visibility Across AI Experiences
As AI-generated answers become a primary way users discover information, understanding where and how your content appears within those experiences is increasingly critical.
The AI Citations dashboard in Microsoft Clarity provides a consolidated view of when your content is cited in AI-generated answers. It surfaces grounding and citation activity across supported AI experiences, helping you understand how your content contributes to AI-driven responses and the visibility that follows.
What Does the AI Citations Dashboard Measure?
The AI Citations dashboard shows how your content is cited in AI-generated answers across supported AI experiences by summarizing and aggregating citation activity across the following areas:
- Queries Cited: The number of query instances where your domain received at least one citation. Each query is counted once, even if your content was cited or referenced multiple times within the same request.
- Query Volume: Total query instances where your domain was eligible to appear within grounding activity, whether cited or not.
- Citation Rate: Reflects how often your domain is cited when it is eligible to appear within grounding activity, comparing total eligible query instances to those where your domain received at least one citation.
- Page Citations: The total number of individual citations to your pages across all grounding requests, including multiple references within a single query.
- Share of Authority: A distribution view showing how page citations are divided between your domain and other sources within overlapping grounding queries.
- Grounding Queries: Highlights the key phrases used by the AI when retrieving cited content, showing where your domain appears, along with query volume, citation frequency, and citation rate.
- Pages: A page-level view highlighting which URLs from your domain are cited and how often they are selected in AI-generated answers.
Data Availability and Methodology
The AI Citations dashboard reflects aggregated citation activity across supported AI experiences for the selected date range. Data is refreshed daily with a short processing delay, and historical data is limited to the ranges shown in the dashboard.
The data provides a representative view of grounding and citation activity rather than a complete log of every reference. Not all citation activity will appear, very low volumes may be excluded, and totals may vary across views such as pages and grounding queries. Metrics may also be refined as additional data is processed.
The dashboard is designed for trend analysis and comparative insights over time, not precise accounting of individual AI answers or prompts.
Turning Insight into Action
Understanding AI citations changes how you evaluate content effectiveness, shifting the focus from traffic alone to how your content contributes to AI-generated answers.
AI Citations help you:
- Align content more closely with user intent by analyzing grounding queries.
- Identify topics where your domain or others gain greater visibility.
- Strengthen depth and subject focus across related content areas.
- Keep content accurate and up to date to support inclusion in AI-generated answers.
- Monitor how AI visibility evolves as your content changes over time.
Getting Started
AI Citations is currently in limited preview by invitation.
If the feature is enabled for your project, you can access it in Microsoft Clarity under: Dashboards → AI Visibility → Citations.
If it is not yet visible in your project, you can request access and we will reach out as access becomes available.
Looking Ahead
AI Citations builds on earlier AI bot activity insights in Microsoft Clarity, extending visibility beyond crawling and indexing to show how, when, and why your content appears in AI-generated answers. Now available in beta, this marks an early step toward Generative Engine Optimization in Microsoft Clarity, helping brands and publishers better understand and strengthen their role in AI-driven experiences.
Together, these capabilities begin to connect visibility across the AI ecosystem, from retrieval and grounding to citation and AI-referred traffic. As AI Visibility in Microsoft Clarity continues to evolve, we will expand coverage to additional partner AI platforms and broader citation signals.