Microsoft added branded and non-branded segmentation to Clarity’s AI Citations dashboard on Monday, letting site owners split the grounding queries that surface their pages in AI answers by whether the query names the brand. The addition closes a measurement gap in AEO, answer engine optimization, optimizing for direct-answer surfaces, reporting that has been quietly misleading teams for as long as visibility scores have existed. Branded and non-branded AI visibility describe two different business situations, and most AEO reporting still averages them into one number.
Showing up when someone asks an AI system about a company by name confirms the model knows the brand exists. Showing up when someone asks a generic category question, and the AI cites that company’s page anyway, is what actually acquires a customer who did not know the brand beforehand. A blended visibility score cannot distinguish those two outcomes. A brand can look healthy on the combined number while being effectively invisible on every query that carries commercial weight, because strong branded performance alone can carry the average.
“You can now distinguish branded and non-branded grounding queries AI systems use to look up supporting information for a response,” Microsoft wrote on the Clarity blog. Barry Schwartz reported the update for Search Engine Land, corroborated the same day by PPC Land and documented directly on Microsoft’s own Clarity blog, a stronger evidence base than most AEO product claims get.
The mechanics are straightforward. Individual entries in the queries card now carry branded labels, so a user can identify at a glance which lookups named the company. The Share of Authority card, which shows how much of an AI answer’s supporting citations trace back to a given site, now breaks that figure out by query type instead of reporting one combined authority score. Dashboard filters let a user isolate branded or non-branded queries across the reports to compare how visibility performs under each condition.
The access point matters as much as the feature. Tools that segment AI visibility by query type typically live behind enterprise AEO pricing. Clarity is free, which puts real branded versus non-branded segmentation within reach of teams that have no budget for dedicated AEO software at all.
Per PPC Land’s reporting, this is the third AI-focused release Microsoft has shipped to Clarity in twenty five days. That pace points to active, ongoing iteration on the AI Citations surface rather than a single feature drop.
Teams running AEO programs should stop reporting one blended visibility number and start tracking branded and non-branded Share of Authority as separate metrics. A brand that dominates searches for its own name but shows up nowhere on category queries has a customer-acquisition problem the blended score was hiding, and Clarity now makes that gap visible for free.
Barry Schwartz reported this for Search Engine Land on August 3, 2026, corroborated the same day by PPC Land and Microsoft’s own Clarity blog.
