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The Stack / Analytics
Microsoft Clarity
05 OutcomesYes, and it's genuinely free — no tiers, no caps that matter, no card. Clarity's heatmaps and recordings show where visitors rage-click, stall, and bail, and its Copilot summarizes sessions in plain language. The only honest objection is data-to-Microsoft; for most operators the price answers it.
The job in the stack
The behavior-evidence seat: heatmaps, session recordings, and Copilot summaries showing how visitors actually use your pages — at zero cost.
Pricing
| Plan | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Unlimited heatmaps, recordings, no paid tier exists |
Pricing verified 2026-10-27. Plans change — the source of truth is Microsoft Clarity's own pricing page.
Models & versions
- Clarity Copilot AI summaries of sessions and heatmap patterns
- AI Visibility New: AI Citations (shows when AI answer engines cite your content) plus AI Bot Activity (traffic share from AI bots/agents/crawlers, via a CDN/edge integration like Cloudflare or Azure Front Door) — free, built into the same dashboard. Sept 2026: deeper Bot Activity metrics and expanded CDN support, page classification for bot traffic (Sept 22), and custom brand terms in AI Visibility reporting (Sept 29). Aug 2026 additions: AI scrape-to-referral insights (which AI crawlers lead to real visits) and branded vs non-branded citation filters. A Clarity MCP server lets agents query your data directly
The honest read
What works
- + Actually free at any scale — Microsoft subsidizes it
- + Rage-click and dead-click detection finds UX failures fast
- + Copilot summaries save watching hours of recordings
- + New AI Visibility feature shows AI-engine citations and bot traffic share at no extra cost
- + GDPR-conscious setup with masking controls
What breaks
- − Your behavioral data lives with Microsoft
- − Insight depth trails paid suites (funnels are basic)
- − Recordings need sampling discipline on huge sites
Use it for
- →Every site owner who's never watched a real session
- →Landing-page optimization on evidence, not opinion
- →Pairing with GA-style counts to explain the why
Skip it if
- ×You need product analytics with identity — PostHog
- ×Enterprise privacy posture forbids MS-hosted behavioral data
Questions operators ask
?What's the catch with free?
Microsoft gets aggregate insight into web behavior; you get enterprise-grade tooling. For most sites that trade is fine — just don't run it on pages handling sensitive data without masking configured.
What changed
- Freshness sweep against clarity.microsoft.com and its blog. Still free forever, no traffic caps, no paid tier. No new features since the Sept 29 brand-terms release; added the August scrape-to-referral insights, citation filters and the Clarity MCP server to the model notes.
- Freshness sweep: still free with no paid tier. September updates from the Clarity blog: Bot Activity got deeper metrics, request-status and trend views, and more CDN integrations; Page Classification sorts bot traffic by page type (Sept 22); AI Visibility now accepts custom brand terms (Sept 29).
- Freshness sweep — genuine feature update, confirmed against Microsoft's own Clarity docs. New "AI Visibility" section adds AI Citations (when AI answer engines cite your content) and AI Bot Activity (share of traffic from AI bots/agents/crawlers, via a one-time CDN/edge connection). Still free forever, no paid tier — the new feature ships to every account at no extra cost. Puts Clarity in light overlap with dedicated AI-visibility tools like Profound, though Clarity's version is free and behavior-analytics-first rather than a competitive GEO specialist.
- Freshness sweep — reverified, no change. Still free forever with no traffic caps and no paid tier; Copilot heatmap-insight summaries confirmed on clarity.microsoft.com.
- Added to the stack (behavior-evidence seat, Outcomes layer). Verified: free, no paid tiers; Copilot summaries included.
Give Microsoft Clarity a job
The behavior-evidence seat: heatmaps, session recordings, and Copilot summaries showing how visitors actually use your pages — at zero cost.
Try Microsoft Clarity →