When Microsoft Clarity made AI citations available to all users, it opened up a new playground for SEOs to harvest AI visibility data. Finally, we can see the exact “grounding queries” an AI engine uses to pull our content.
It raises a massive question because this is a Microsoft tool: Are the insights useless if your audience doesn’t touch the Bing ecosystem?
Microsoft Clarity Grounding Queries
When you ask Copilot a question, it translates your words into simple search terms called grounding queries to find facts on the web before it answers. You can use this data to improve your own website and content. Finding gaps where your content does not match what the AI searches for.
Simplifying pages that the AI reads but does not link to.
Using these simple layouts to help your Google search results. Copilot Vs. Gemini
Both Copilot and Gemini use retrieval-augmented approaches. Instead of generating answers using only pre-trained parameters, they dynamically query external search indexes to retrieve real-time data, which they then use as context to ground their final responses. Feature
Microsoft Copilot
Google Gemini Structure
Uses a query translator, Bing index search, and OpenAI models to write the final text.
Uses a query translator, Google Search, and Google’s Gemini models to write the final text. Pulling Sources
Uses the Bing index and Microsoft Graph to scan web pages, emails, and Microsoft 365 files. (With permissions enabled)
Uses Google Search and Google Workspace to scan web pages, Google Drive files, and Gmail. (With permissions enabled) Synthesising Answers
Focuses on direct answers. It uses structured lists, tables, and bullet points to show facts quickly.
Focuses on creative, conversational answers. It is built to handle text, images, and code at the same time. Does Ranking In Bing Matter?
Yes (Correlation). One of my websites was doing extremely well in Copilot, with over 36,000 citations across all queries. Now, Clarity doesn’t give you the prompts/queries themselves, but it does give you the Grounding queries (grounding queries and key phrases used to retrieve your site’s content).
Image from author, May 2026
My website has a history, running for years with a previous domain merged in 2019, and boasts over 1,000 articles. Given that Google barely sends traffic, and third-party SEO tools often label it as spam due to non-English backlinks (it covers search engines like Baidu, CocCoc, SwissCows, attracting an international audience), I never expected 36,000 citations. So, why the Copilot love? I took the 147 grounding queries and tracked their rank in Google and Bing.
Image from author, May 2026
Of the 147 queries, Bing ranked all but 6, with the majority in traffic-driving positions (top 20). Google didn’t rank a single one.
So, If This Is Heavily Dependent On Bing Indexing, Is Clarity’s Data Useful Outside Of The Bing/Microsoft Ecosystem?
Because this is a Microsoft tool, the backend data feeding this dashboard is primarily capturing how your site is cited across Microsoft’s AI surfaces (like Copilot and Bing generative search).
It is not giving you a direct window into how OpenAI’s ChatGPT (using its own search), Google Gemini, or Perplexity are citing your links, because those platforms do not share their internal grounding logs with Microsoft. And historically, we as an industry have been neglectful of Bing.
Even though the data collection source is skewed toward Microsoft’s AI engine, the insights themselves are highly transferable to your broader, platform-agnostic AI optimization strategies.
Can We Assume Other LLMs Retrieve Data In The Same Way?
AI engines, whether Google Gemini or Microsoft Copilot, use similar RAG frameworks to fetch data.
If the Bing ecosystem flags that a specific page on your site has a high “Share of Authority” for a complex query, it means that page is structured perfectly for AI consumption (clear…