On August 3, 2026, Microsoft posted an update to its free analytics tool Clarity's AI Citations dashboard. You can now break down every grounding query — the query an AI system used to find and cite your content — into branded queries (ones that include your brand name) and non-branded queries (ones that don't). This is the first time Clarity has split the queries behind an AI citation this way.
It's the third citation-related release from Clarity in 25 days. The first two just showed which queries cited you. This one is the first to answer a different question: was that citation because someone already knew you, or because someone found you for the first time?
Context — why this is a story
A previous issue in this series covered how search's currency is shifting from clicks to citations. But "you got cited" alone doesn't tell you much. Splitting branded from non-branded queries is one of the oldest divisions in paid search, and this update brings that same split into AI citation data.
The reading: one principle
A citation from a branded query means someone who already knew you asked to confirm something. A citation from a non-branded query means a stranger asked a generic question and the AI found your page on its own. The first reflects existing awareness; only the second is genuinely new discovery. Until now, "citations up by 100" was one undifferentiated number — it could mean 100 repeat confirmations from existing fans, or 100 people discovering you for the first time. There was no way to tell.
What's confirmed and what isn't — Confirmed: the update went live on Clarity's official blog on August 3, and Clarity remains completely free. Unconfirmed: the announcement doesn't say whether the filter rolled out to every account at once or is still staging out (checked August 5, 2026).
If your site gets 100 visitors a week
Clarity takes minutes to install and has no visitor cap. If you're already using it, start by filtering the AI Citations dashboard down to non-branded queries — that number is your real "newly discovered" count. If you're not using it yet, this gives you a free way to check whether AI systems cite you at all — the same situation this project's AI briefing site is in, where Google Search Console shows impressions but zero clicks. Swap the habit of watching click counts for watching citation counts, especially non-branded ones.