Microsoft announced on August 3 that Clarity's AI Citations dashboard now labels each query as branded or non-branded. "Not all AI visibility comes from the same kind of query: some citations are driven by queries that reference a brand directly, while others come from broader, generic queries an AI system uses to help answer a prompt," the announcement reads.

The release has three parts. Individual queries in the Queries card now carry a branded or non-branded label. Share of Authority, Clarity's measure of how much of the cited ground a site holds for a given query, is now broken out by query type. And a new filter applies the split across the whole dashboard, so a team can compare how it performs when an AI system looks the brand up by name against how it performs in generic category research. Microsoft's stated goal: "By separating brand-led demand from generic discovery, you can better assess brand strength, identify discovery and consideration opportunities, and interpret changes in citation performance with greater confidence."

It is Clarity's third AI-citation release in 25 days, following Topic Insights on July 9 and automatic query-topic grouping on July 22, a cadence PPC Land tracked. Search Engine Land confirmed the feature is live in the AI Visibility dashboard. In the sample dashboard Microsoft published (its own example, so treat the numbers as illustrative), branded queries drove roughly 43% of about 8,100 citations and held the two highest Share of Authority figures, at 24.2% and 22.3%; the highest-volume non-branded query sat fourth at 20.3%.

Clarity is free, and Microsoft is now shipping AI-visibility features monthly. Citation tracking, the entry product for much of the AI-visibility tool market, is becoming a standard feature of a mainstream analytics suite.

The takeaway: the split matters more than the dashboard. Branded queries measure demand a brand has already earned, buyers asking AI about it by name. Non-branded queries are the open category research where AI models decide who makes the shortlist in the first place, and that is where market position is won or lost. A citation count still only shows what AI models retrieve, not why they weigh a brand the way they do or what they tell a buyer about it. Read Clarity's new split as a free early-warning gauge, not a diagnosis.