Microsoft Clarity now shows what AI agents do on your website

On Wednesday, November 4, Microsoft announced three additions to Clarity, its free website analytics tool. The headliner is Agentic Analytics. Its Agent Activity dashboard shows how much of your traffic comes from AI agents, which agents they are and what they do on the site: searches, form submissions, logins, downloads, appointment bookings and checkout. Microsoft says it currently recognizes agents from Google, OpenAI and Anthropic.

Clarity can also run simulations, sending a test agent through a key task on your site and reporting whether it finished, how long it took, how many steps it needed and where it got stuck. Simulations start with commerce and travel tasks.

The second addition, Brand Agents, is an AI shopping assistant that uses your live catalog, shipping and return policies, and brand voice to answer shoppers. Eligible Shopify and WooCommerce merchants can have products appear in Microsoft Copilot, Bing and MSN, with the purchase finished on the merchant's own site. For local businesses, for now on eligible WordPress sites, the same agent can explain services, capture leads and book appointments, and it connects to tools such as Square, Jobber, HubSpot, Calendly, Housecall Pro and Salesforce. The third, Ask Clarity, answers questions about your site's behavior data and points to the session recordings behind each answer. Ask Clarity is in a closed beta for retailers, with a waitlist.

Microsoft says weekly agent sessions in Clarity nearly doubled in three weeks, to almost 2 million. Its October 29 study looked at 5.2 million agent sessions across 230,511 Clarity projects between August 13 and September 9, 2026, and compared them with human visits to the same sites.

• Checkout: recorded in 25.2% of agent sessions, against 14.7% of human sessions.
• Form submission: 19.9% of agent sessions, against 18.6% for humans.
• Appointment booking: 8.4% of agent sessions.
• On-site search: 7.2% of agent sessions, against 4.8% for humans.
• Clicking away to another site: 14.3% of agent sessions, against 27.0% for humans.

People wander. Agents run errands. An agent rarely clicks a banner because it looked interesting. It shows up with a shopping list.

Microsoft is careful about what this proves, and so are we. A session can start with an agent and end with a human taking over, and Clarity can't tell those apart. The events also overlap and come from many industries, so they describe activity during agent-involved visits, not finished purchases made by robots.

The agents are not shopping for themselves. A YouGov survey published November 4 found that 34% of likely Black Friday and Cyber Monday shoppers expect to use an AI tool to help with the sales this year, up from 16% in 2025. YouGov surveyed 1,495 US adults online between July 13 and August 11, 2026.

Among shoppers likely to use AI, ChatGPT and Google Gemini tie at 29% each, followed by Microsoft Copilot at 14%, Meta AI and Grok at 10% each, Claude at 9% and Perplexity at 3%. Another 40% of Black Friday shoppers say they won't use AI at all, so the regular checkout line stays busy. The agents just get a fast lane.

AI still sends a sliver of total visits. In a Clarity study from April of the 2,000 Clarity projects that get the most AI traffic, AI platforms still accounted for under 1% of sessions between October 2025 and March 2026, even after AI-referred traffic grew 22% over six months.

Those visitors behaved more like people with a specific task. They went straight back to the page before less often than organic search visitors (1.60 times per session against 2.04) and stayed longer (about 15.7 minutes against 14.2). Microsoft notes that conversions themselves stretch session times, so treat these as signals of intent.

Put these numbers together and the job gets specific. Agents arrive with a task, and they need your site to let them finish it. That means prices written as text instead of baked into images, buttons labeled with words instead of only icons, forms that don't hide behind a pop-up, and a checkout that doesn't demand an account before it shows the total.

For service businesses, an agent may reach the booking form before a person does. If the appointment types are hard to tell apart, the task can stop there.

Websites have mostly been written for people who skim. AI agents behave differently: labels, buttons and form steps become instructions. Clarity gives you a free way to see where those visits move forward and where they stop.

Want help making your booking or checkout flow work for people and their AI assistants? Our founders can walk through it with you. Talk to them below. See you in the next edition.