AI-Driven Classification of Website Visitor Demographics by Microsoft Clarity for traffic analysis
Microsoft Clarity Introduces AI Channel Groups for Comprehensive Website Analysis
Microsoft Clarity, the user behaviour analytics service, has expanded its capabilities to include two new channel groups: AI Platform and Paid AI Platform. These channel groups aim to distinguish between different traffic sources and their associated behaviour patterns, providing valuable insights into how artificial intelligence tools drive website discovery and engagement.
The AI Platform channel group tracks organic sessions from users arriving via AI chat platforms such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, and Perplexity. Microsoft added Copilot to Clarity analytics on April 18, 2025, enabling natural language queries. The new tracking capabilities enable detailed analysis of how AI-referred users interact with website content, identifying specific friction points that prevent AI traffic from completing desired actions.
The Paid AI Platform channel group, on the other hand, tracks sessions originating from advertisements within AI experiences.
The technical implementation ensures that AI traffic tracking operates within current security frameworks, with no additional user data collection beyond Clarity's standard behavioural tracking scope. Data retention policies apply uniformly to AI traffic analytics, with session recordings and behavioural data following the same storage and deletion protocols as other Clarity tracking capabilities.
The new channel groups integrate seamlessly with Clarity's established analytics ecosystem, allowing organisations to combine AI traffic insights with data from other analytics platforms. For instance, the heatmap functionality extends to AI traffic analysis, generating visual representations of where users focus attention after arriving from AI platforms.
Microsoft Clarity bridged the ad gap with AI insights on May 15, 2025, by launching the Campaign Insights feature. This feature allows website operators to identify and segment visitors who discovered their content through conversational AI interactions rather than traditional search engines.
The introduction of AI-specific tracking addresses the analytical gap of traditional traffic sources by providing dedicated measurement tools for emerging traffic patterns. Microsoft Clarity launched an AI analytics bridge for developer tools on June 8, 2025, enabling natural language queries through AI assistants.
Microsoft maintains existing privacy standards for AI traffic tracking functionality, processing data collection through established frameworks that comply with GDPR, CCPA, and similar privacy regulations. The companies providing the AI-based chat platforms tracked by Microsoft Clarity in the new Channel groups AI-Platform and Paid-AI-Platform include Perplexity AI and Glean, among others integrated with Microsoft technologies such as Microsoft 365 Copilot and in-house Microsoft AI models.
These channel groups operate within Clarity's existing analytics infrastructure and can be accessed through the existing Clarity dashboard without additional setup requirements. The platform records complete user journeys from initial AI platform interaction through site conversion or exit, including navigation patterns, click behaviours, and engagement metrics specific to AI-referred traffic.
The AI Platform and Paid AI Platform channel groups are part of a broader industry trend toward more sophisticated traffic categorization. Microsoft Clarity's AI channel groups are a significant step forward in understanding and optimising the impact of AI on website traffic and user engagement.
