Microsoft Clarity Lets Brands Edit Which AI Queries Count as Branded

Microsoft Clarity now lets customers edit the Brand Terms that decide which AI queries count as branded in its AI Visibility dashboard.

In August, Clarity added branded and non-branded segmentation to its citations dashboard, according to its own post. The Share of Authority card now breaks out results by branded and non-branded queries. Branded queries reference a brand directly. Non-branded ones are the broader, generic grounding queries an AI system uses to look up supporting information for an answer.

The new release, described in a Clarity blog post, makes the classification editable. Under Settings > AI Visibility, users can add, edit or remove Brand Terms. Clarity pre-populates the initial list. Terms can cover abbreviations, alternate spellings, localized names, translations and common typos. Clarity’s example: a Brand Name such as Microsoft could include the Brand Terms Microsoft, MS and Microsoft Corporation. Related terms can be grouped under one Brand Name, and reports can be filtered by the Brand Name or by a single term.

Why it matters

The split between direct brand visibility and category discovery depends on the term list. Clarity says keeping Brand Names and Brand Terms current improves classification accuracy and reporting quality.

Our read

This is our inference, not something Clarity states: changing the list will move queries between the two buckets, so a trend line can shift without any change in how AI systems behave. Treat the term list as a controlled document. Record who changed it and on what date, and annotate trend charts at each edit. That keeps a rise in category discovery from being an artifact of last week’s settings change. For earlier context, see our opinion piece on AI search anxiety and budgets and our report on AI visibility tools tracking Meta’s Muse agent.

Source: Microsoft Clarity