Microsoft Clarity added a new feature called Topic Insights on 9th July 2026. Here’s what it does and what it means for brands trying to get cited by ChatGPT or any other LLM.
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What Is Topic Insights?
Microsoft Clarity added its first AI visibility feature back in May. This feature told you whether your content had been referenced inside an AI-generated answer, but not why a competitor showed up for the query, or what to go and write next.
Topic Insights is Clarity’s attempt to close that gap. For any topic you define, it breaks the picture down into four parts:
- Visibility – how often your domain gets cited across AI responses, and your share of authority compared with everyone else being cited on the same topic.
- Influence – how much of a given AI answer your content supports, not just whether you’re mentioned in passing.
- Competition – which domains keep showing up alongside you, where they’re beating you and which gaps are worth closing first.
- Opportunities – specific, prioritised actions for improving coverage or strengthening authority on that topic.
You set the topics, prompts and competitors yourself, based on the questions your customers are asking and the brands you’re up against.
How Topic Insights Works
Topic Insights runs a set of representative prompts, the sort of queries your customers are typing into an AI assistant, and checks which domains and pages get cited in the response.
It then measures how much each source contributes to that answer and sums all of it up to the topic level, so you can learn the patterns.
Microsoft has said this is a beta running on GPT-5.3, and is capped at 10 reports a week per project, with WebIQ handling the search grounding underneath.
You should treat the visibility as directional. While it’s a strong signal, it’s not a guarantee. It’s also not available to everyone yet, and access depends on your website category; some won’t see every report even once they’re eligible.
What’s Useful and What’s Not There Yet
One of the strongest parts of the new feature is the competitor view. Rather than only scoring you against the rivals you’ve named, Clarity surfaces every domain that shows up in the AI answers, so you get a defined comparison set plus a wider read on who else is picking up citations in your space.
Attribution is worth knowing about before you lean too heavily on this, though. It currently sits at the topic level. So you can see that a topic earned a citation, but not which of your 10-15 prompts triggered it, and you can’t read the AI-generated answer your content appeared in, only Clarity’s summary of why it was cited.
A few other limits are worth knowing, too. Reports only run against ChatGPT right now, so Gemini, Claude and Perplexity are currently blind spots, and each model tends to summarise their answers differently.
The competitor list is global rather than topic-specific, and the report history has no trendline connecting them, so working out whether you’re improving means clicking back through old reports and comparing the numbers by eye.
None of that stops it from being worth using, however. As it already covers a lot of what paid AI visibility tools usually charge for, and it’s ahead of Google Search Console’s own AI performance report, which still only shows impressions with no citation detail at all.
What This Looks Like For Marwick Clients
Destinations & Resorts
Travel searches tend to be the kind of queries Topic Insights is built to unpack, such as comparisons, seasonal questions and “best time to visit” style prompts.
For destinations and resorts, this means you can finally see whether it’s a competing hotel group or a travel blog winning the citation on “best coastal spa breaks in Cornwall,” and build the recommended content to close the gap.
E-Commerce
Product and category queries are heavily topic-driven by nature. If you’re consistently missing citations on “best running shoes for X” while a competitor picks them up, Topic Insights will show you that pattern.
For e-commerce brands, that’s a much more efficient way to prioritise which product guides, comparison pages, or buying-guide content to build next.
Food & Beverage
Discovery questions like “best places for X near me” or “what pairs well with Y” cluster naturally into topics.
Food and beverage brands can now see whether they’re the source AI assistants are sourcing for the recommendations, or whether a competitor’s blog or a third-party listings site is winning all of the visibility.
Outdoor
Outdoor and adventure queries are often research-heavy, such as trail conditions and gear comparisons. These are the kinds of topics where authority and depth matter to an AI system deciding what to cite.
For outdoor brands, Topic Insights offers a way to see exactly which competitor’s guide is being trusted over yours on a given topic, and what’s missing from your own content that would close that gap.
Get a Baseline Before Your Competitors Do
The brands that get the most out of Topic Insights will be the ones using it to build a baseline now and then tracking how visibility shifts as they publish new content.
If you want help setting up your topics, prompts and competitor list properly, or turning what Topic Insights surfaces into a content plan, get in touch to find out more about our AI Optimisation services.
