• by Laurie Sullivan , Yesterday

Microsoft is developing new methods to measure how often and how favorably brands appear in AI-generated answers, and aims to help companies track their footprint inside conversational search engines and large language models like Copilot.

Clarity, Microsoft's free behavioral user analytics product, plans to release features around topic insights that automatically group cited queries into intent-driven themes, so advertisers can better understand why and in what context AI systems select content being served in search queries.

The feature, which helps advertisers understand the influence of their brand's content on answers and citations to queries, is part of a tool the company calls “Citations.”

Microsoft intends to turn Clarity into an AI-driven behavioral hub for the agentic web.

Citations can provide competitive and attributable analysis to help website owners understand where their content appears and how strongly it contributes to AI-generated responses in relation to other sources across the web.

Clarity developers are working on this service, and earlier this week, the Microsoft analytics company introduced a dashboard to show advertisers how content is referenced or performed in AI-generated answers across all types of AI experiences.

It does this by summarizing and aggregating citation activity in AI search results. Page citations such as the total number of pages from a website domain were referenced in AI-generated answers during the selected period. 

It provides insight by showing the percentage of total citations attributed to the domain compared with other cited domains in the same set of queries where the marketer’s domain appeared.  

Citations also will identify AI referral traffic in the percentage of percentage of sessions on a marketers’ website, queries used by AI systems to retrieve and evaluate your content before generating an answer, page-level view showing which URLs from the domain cited in AI-generated answers, and trendlines for cited pages and queries.

When Clarity introduced Citations in a preview mode, the goal was to gain feedback to help refine how these signals are measured, aggregated, and presented.

Publishers and brands wanted clearer ways to interpret citation patterns across queries, pages, and overall visibility trends, leading to several updates to the reporting experience and underlying metrics.