AI Bot Activity in Microsoft Clarity: See How AI Really Accesses Your Site

For years, analytics have told only half the story. 

You could see what people did on your site: where they clicked, how far they scrolled, what they converted on. But a growing share of traffic was happening quietly in the background, invisible to traditional tools. 

AI systems, search crawlers, and automated agents are now accessing content on a massive scale. They read pages, fetch resources, and revisit sites continuously. This activity consumes infrastructure, influences how content is summarized or surfaced later, and increasingly shapes how users discover information. Yet for most site owners, it has been a blind spot. 

Today, we’re introducing AI Bot Activity in Microsoft Clarity to change that. 

Why Bot Activity Matters in the AI era 

In the past, crawling mostly meant one thing: search engines preparing content for indexing. 

Today, crawling by bots is often the earliest observable signal of how content may later be used by AI systems—summarized, cited, or surfaced in assistant-driven experiences. And unlike traditional crawlers, AI systems can access content continuously, across many platforms, and at significant volume. 

That creates new questions for publishers and site owners: 

• Which systems are accessing our content? 

• Is this bot activity productive or just expensive? 

• Which pages are being accessed most aggressively? 

• How does automated access relate to future visibility or engagement? 

Without measurement, these questions are impossible to answer. AI Bot Activity is designed to make this behavior visible, so you’re no longer guessing. 

A New Level of Visibility into AI Access 

AI Bot Activity reveals how verified bots interact with your content. Instead of treating crawler traffic as background noise, Clarity turns it into something you can actually measure and analyze. 

With AI Bot Activity, you can see: 

• Which AI systems and platforms are accessing your site 

• How frequently they crawl and at what scale 

• Which pages, paths, and resources attract the most automated attention 

This isn’t inferred or modeled behavior. AI Bot Activity is powered by real server-side logs collected through CDN integrations, data that client-side analytics simply can’t see. 

The result is a trustworthy view of automated access, grounded in what’s actually hitting your infrastructure. 

What AI Bot Activity Shows 

With the Bot Activity dashboard in Microsoft Clarity, you can explore: 

• AI crawl request share: shows the proportion of total page requests, including human traffic, that originate from AI bots. 

• Bot activity by purpose: groups automated requests based on the primary role of the system accessing your content. 

• Crawler requests by operator: identifies which platforms and organizations are crawling your site. 

• Path requests: highlights the pages and resources most frequently accessed by automated systems. 

These insights help transform bot traffic from background noise into a measurable audience. 

Built on Real Server-Side Data 

What differentiates AI Bot Activity is the data behind it. 

Instead of relying on client-side scripts or inferred signals, AI Bot Activity uses server-side logs from connected content delivery networks (CDNs) to identify crawler behavior with high accuracy. This allows for reliable attribution by operator, purpose, and request patterns. 

The result is a clearer, more trustworthy view of how automated systems access your content. 

From Blind Spots to Informed Decisions 

AI Bot Activity does not block bots or manage access directly. Instead, it provides the intelligence needed to make informed decisions around: 

• Performance and infrastructure planning 

• Crawl policies and access strategies 

• Content prioritization and optimization 

• Evaluating the cost and impact of automated access 

By making bot behavior visible, site owners can move from guesswork to data-backed decisions. 

Getting Started 

AI Bot Activity is now available in Microsoft Clarity under Dashboards → AI Visibility → AI Bot Activity. 

Project admins can enable this feature by connecting a supported CDN through the AI Visibility section in the Project Settings. The self-serve onboarding experience shows currently supported CDN providers and upcoming integrations. Supported CDNs include Fastly, Amazon CloudFront, and Cloudflare. 

For WordPress sites using the latest Microsoft Clarity plugin, AI Bot Activity will be available automatically. Sites running an older version of the Clarity plugin for WordPress will need to update it to access the feature. 

This Is Just the Beginning 

AI Bot Activity is the first step in a broader AI Visibility experience in Microsoft Clarity. 

We’re continuing to expand this foundation with deeper insights, richer correlations, and additional visibility signals to help publishers better understand how automated systems interact with their content and where that interaction creates real value.