AI Search
Microsoft has made its Citations feature in Microsoft Clarity generally available, giving website owners a way to track how their content is being referenced in AI-generated answers across supported AI experiences.
The tool is designed to address a growing blind spot in digital marketing: as AI assistants increasingly synthesise answers from multiple web sources rather than presenting a list of links, traditional SEO metrics like rankings, impressions and clicks no longer capture the full picture of how content is being discovered.
Citations aims to show site owners when and where their pages are being used as sources in what Microsoft calls “grounding” – the process AI systems use to retrieve relevant content before generating a response.
The shift toward AI-generated answers has changed how users find information online. Rather than clicking through search results, users are receiving synthesised responses that draw from multiple sources across the web.
For publishers and brands, this means visibility is no longer just about where a page ranks. It is about whether that content is being selected and used by AI systems to shape the answers users see.
Microsoft argues that most teams are still measuring SEO the way they always have, while the mechanics of discovery are changing underneath them. A page could rank well in traditional search results and still be absent from the AI-generated answers that are becoming a primary channel for information discovery.
The Citations dashboard aggregates several metrics designed to give site owners a view of their presence in AI-generated responses.
Page citations show the total number of times pages from a domain were referenced in AI-generated answers during a selected time period, including multiple citations within the same answer.
Share of authority provides a competitive view, showing the percentage of total citations attributed to a domain compared to other cited domains within the same set of queries.
AI referral traffic measures the percentage of sessions on a site that originate from AI assistants, calculated as AI-referred sessions divided by total sessions.
The dashboard also surfaces the queries that AI systems used to retrieve and evaluate content before generating an answer, giving site owners insight into how AI systems interpret user intent and connect it to their pages.
A page-level view shows which specific URLs from a domain were cited, along with citation counts and associated grounding queries. Trendlines allow users to track how citation activity changes over time as content evolves and AI query patterns shift.
The feature was previously available in preview, during which Microsoft gathered feedback from early users. Publishers and brands indicated they wanted clearer ways to interpret citation patterns across queries, pages and visibility trends.
That feedback informed updates to the reporting experience and underlying metrics ahead of general availability. Changes include updates to the reporting model, query views, filtering and pagination to improve performance across larger datasets and longer time ranges.
Citations is available to Microsoft Clarity projects. Site owners need to create a Clarity project and install the Clarity tracking code on their site. Once enabled, the Citations dashboard begins surfacing insights automatically.
In some cases, domain ownership verification may be required before citation reporting becomes available. This can be completed by connecting either Bing Webmaster Tools or Google Search Console to a Clarity project.
For projects associated with multiple domains, a single domain must be selected during setup for Citations reporting. Microsoft notes that support for changing the selected domain after setup is not yet available.
The dashboard can be accessed in Microsoft Clarity under Dashboards, then AI Visibility, then Citations.
Microsoft has flagged upcoming additions to the Citations feature. Topic insights, which will automatically group cited queries into intent-driven themes, are planned to help teams understand not just what content is being surfaced but why and in what context AI systems are selecting it.
The company indicated these capabilities will provide competitive and attribution analysis, helping site owners understand where their content appears and how it contributes to AI-generated responses relative to other sources. The goal is to help teams identify content gaps, build authority across topics and appear more frequently in AI answers.
Microsoft has not provided a specific timeline for these additions beyond stating they are launching soon.
Last Updated on May 16, 2026 by Nick Ross
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Nick Ross is a veteran tech journalist. He is Editor in Chief of SMBtech, an Australian-focused website for technology and business, and High Performance Laptops.
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