Microsoft Clarity Bot Activity: Turning AI Crawlers into Actionable Publisher Insight

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Microsoft’s new Clarity “Bot Activity” dashboardard turns what publishers long treated as background noise into measurable intelligence, and that shift matters: by surfacing verified AI crawler activity from server-side logs, Clarity gives site owners an early, actionable signal about how automated systems are reading, indexing, and potentially harvesting their content — days, weeks, or months before any citation, referral, or visible downstream traffic appears.

Background​

Microsoft Clarity’s AI Visibility suite has expanded beyond client-side behavioral recordings into a server-log driven view of automated access. The new Bot Activity dashboard ingests request-level logs from supported CDN and server integrations — Fastly, Amazon CloudFront, Cloudflare, or via the WordPress plugin — to classify and quantify bot and AI crawler behavior at the infrastructure level. This is not inferred behavior: it’s what actually hit your edge and origin. That ground-level visibility responds to an industry problem publishers and platforms have wrestled with for the last 18 months: AI-driven crawlers and retrieval agents are reading the web at volumes and cadences that traditional analytics tools do not capture. Third-party analyses and news investigations show substantial increases in retrieval-type bot traffic, and publishers are increasingly pressured to decide whether to block, meter, or monetize that access. Clarity’s feature enters that debate by offering a way to measure the phenomenon early in the AI content lifecycle.

What Bot Activity measures — the dashboard and its metrics​

Microsoft frames Bot Activity as an upstream, earliest observable signal in the AI content chain. The dashboard exposes several distinct metrics and views that are specifically useful to operations, editorial, and analytics teams:
  • Bot operator — identifies which platforms and organizations generate automated requests to your site and shows their proportion of total requests. This view defaults to AI-related operators but can show all identified bots.
  • AI request share — the percentage of total page requests that originated from AI bots, measured against overall traffic to give context on impact.
  • Bot activity metric — categorizes automated requests by purpose (search/indexing, retrieval for assistants, embedding generation, developer/data services), helping distinguish why bots crawl, not just how often.
  • Path requests — aggregates requests at the path level (HTML, images, JSON endpoints, XML files, other assets) so site teams can see which specific pages or resources receive the most automated attention.
These elements together let teams move from anecdote (“I think we’re being scraped”) to evidence (“these endpoints got 72% of AI fetches over the past 30 days, mostly from Operator X”). That can inform capacity planning, caching/edge rules, prioritization of Content Security Policy or robots.txt controls, and commercial decisions around licensing access.

Why server-side logs matter (and what client-side analytics miss)​

Client-side analytics — the JavaScript tags embedded in pages — are blind to a large class of automated activity because many AI retrieval systems issue requests from server-side agents that never execute page scripts. That means client-only analytics will undercount or entirely miss high-volume retrieval activity that nonetheless consumes infrastructure and may eventually be used to generate downstream answers that supplant direct visits. Clarity’s Bot Activity relies on CDN/server log forwarding to fill that blind spot. This architectural difference has three practical consequences:
  • Measurement fidelity: server logs capture raw HTTP events (requests, headers, status codes) and richer metadata available at the edge — enabling more accurate bot identification.
  • Cost visibility: because the data flow comes from your CDN or hosting, Clarity warns that enabling the feature may have cost implications depending on provider pricing, traffic volume, and regional configuration. Those costs are billed by the CDN/cloud provider, not by Clarity.
  • Actionability: knowing which paths are being scraped lets teams implement surgical countermeasures (edge rules, IP policies, API key gating) and, crucially, evaluate whether a given crawler is productiveversions) or purely extractive (creates cost without value).

What this means for publishers: measurement, economics, and content strategy​

Microsoft’s broader analysis — and Microsoft’s Clarity dataset specifically — has already fed industry debate. In Clarity’s sample of more than 1,200 publisher and news domains, AI-driven referrals were reported to have grown roughly +155% over, although they still represented less than 1% of total sessions during the measured period. Clarity also found higher per-visit conversion rates for AI-referred visitors in that sample, particularly for sign-ups and subscription flows — a pattern that emphasizes quality over quantity in some verticals. Those numbers are sample-dependent and should not be generalized to every site or business model without testing. Why that nuance matters:
  • Conversion profile matters: publishers that rely on membership, subscriptions, or gated content may see a small number of AI-driven visits produce outsized downstream value. Clarity’s publisher sample shows higher sign-up and subscription lift for AI referrals relative to search in some cases — but that effect is context-specific and sensitive to sample selection and short time windows. Treat these figures as directional signals, not universal laws.
  • The invisible web problem: many AI interactions are “zero-click” — users receive synthesized answers directly without clicking. That influence is invisible to pageview-based monetization, creating an attribution gap that can depress measured traffic while the consumption of content may be increasing via non-human agents. Clarity’s Bot Activity aims to make at least the upstream consumption visible so publishers can quantify what was previously dark.
  • Monetization choices: publishers must choose whether to block, meter, or monetize crawlers. Some newsrooms have used third‑party telemetry to negotiate retrieval licenses, while others opt to throttle or deny access to protect revenue and infrastructure. The right path depends on your business model and the proportion of bot access that converts or creates commercial value. External reports show that publishers are increasingly reopening the debate about whether blocking is the optimal strategy when some crawlers can be legitimate downstream partners.

Industry context: retrieval bots, scale, and risk​

Independent reporting and vendor telemetry confirm the directionality Clarity describes: retrieval-style bots and AI crawlers grew dramatically in 2024–2025. For example, industry analysis cited in major outlets found retrieval bot traffic increased substantially in early 2025, and security/anti-fraud vendors observed rapid rises in LLM-driven crawler requests across customer bases. These trends create both opportunity and risk for publishers: more automated access can mean greater eventual visibility in AI answers, but it can also mean infrastructure costs, intellectual property exposure, and revenue displacement when synthesized answers replace direct visits. Two practical industry takeaways emerge from cross-vendor data:
  • There is real growth in automated retrieval and assistant-oriented crawling that differs from historical search-engine crawling in cadence, depth, and targeting.
  • The legal and commercial frameworks for compensating publishers for retrieval-based use are immature; some publishers are negotiating deals, but a majority still see uncompensated scraping combined with declining human visits as an unresolved business problem.

How to use Bot Activity: operational playbook​

Clarity’s dashboard is not a silver bullet, but itractical toolkit for site owners. The following steps outline a basic, prioritized playbook for teams adopting Bot Activity:
  • Connect logs selectively. Start with a small-scope integration (a staging site or limited domain set) to validate data quality and estimate CDN logging costs. Microsoft documentation and the onboarding flow list supported providers and include WordPress plugin specifics.
  • Baseline bot load. Use the Bot operator and AI request share metrics to establish a 30–90 day baseline of automated request volume and the top operators accessing your content. Capture both absolute and relative metrics (requests per minute, percent of total requests).
  • Map impact by path. Use Path requests to identify specific pages and endpoints with high automated access. Prioritize investigation on paths that are expensive to render (large images, heavy API endpoints) or that contain high-value content.
  • Evaluate value. Cross-reference path-level bot activity w (referrals, conversion events, subscription sign-ups) to determine which operators are producing tangible value. For many publishers, only a small subset of crawlers will show any downstream ROI.
  • Decide controls. If activity is extractive and costly, implement tiered responses: rate limits at the CDN, robots.txt for naive crawlers, authenticated API access for structured data, or legal/commercial outreach for licensing discussions. Conversely, if a crawler produces measurable value, consider whitelisting and building partnership terms.
  • Monitor and iterate. Bot behavior evolves rapidly. Keep Bot Activity enabled while running periodic reviews of operators, request profiles, and costs. Use alerts for sudden increases in AI reqators appearing in your logs.

Risks, limits, and things Clarity doesn’t (yet) solve​

Clarity’s Bot Activity is a major step, but it has limits and trade-offs that teams must understand before relying on it as a single truth source.
  • Sample bias and external validity. Clarity’s growth and conversion statistics derive from instrumented publisher samples. Percentage growth figures (for example, the often-cited +155% growth) are accurate for Clarity’s sample but can be misleading when applied broadly — high percentage growth from a tiny base can look dramatic while representing modest absolute volume.s directional benchmarks, not universal expectations.
  • Server-side integration required. The feature depends on CDN/server forwarding. Some operators may lack access to their CDN configurations or fear the marginal costs of log forwarding. Clarity explicitly warns of potential provider costs; teams must budget and test accordingly.
  • No automatic blocking or enforcement. Bot Activity is observational; it doesn’t block or manage crawlers for you. Action still needs to be taken through CDN rules, firewall policies, or commercial/legal channels.
  • Attribution gaps remain. Even with upstream bot visibility, “zero-click” AI consumption (where the assistant answers a user without exposing a referrer) can still produce invisible influence. That means Bot Act not eliminate, publisher uncertainty about AI-driven consumption.
  • Operator identification is probabilistic. Attributing an automated request to a specific AI operator often requires header patterns, IP ranges, and other heuristics. While Clarity integrates multiple signals, edge cases and false positives remain possible; decisions should be corroborated with other logs and vendor intelligence.
When claims are made about the absolute volume of AI referrals or the immediate commercial impact, those claims should be flagged as sample-dependent or provisional unless corroborated by multiple independent datasets. Clarity’s dataset is authoritative for its cohort of instrumented sites, but broader conclusions about the entire web require cross-vendor confirmation.

The security and policy angle​

Bot Activity also has implications for security teams. High-volume automated access can amplify exposure to scraping, content theft, or even reconnaissance for fraud campaigns. Visibility into which systems access what content can feed SOC triage: distinguishing benign indexing from suspicious chains that probe for high-value artifacts or API endpoints. Conversely, publishing teams must balance detection with privacy and legal constraints when logging and analyzing request-level data. Industry observers also warn that AI crawlers are not monolithic. Some operate to support live assistants (retrieval), others to produce embeddings for model training, and some are outright malicious or opportunistic scraping operations. Clarity’s categorization of bot activity by purpose helps separate those behaviors, but security teams still need to pair Clarity’s outputs with UEBA/SIEM correlation and endpoint telemetry for a complete defensive posture.

Practical examples: how publishers are responding​

Several publisher strategies are emerging in response to rising bot activity:
  • Selective metering: Some sites gate high-value content endpoints behind API keys or subscription checks while keeping other content open to maintain visibility.
  • Partner licensing: A handful of publishers leverage retrieval-traffic telemetry to negotiate compensation or access agreements with AI vendors that rely on their content.
  • Surgical blocking: For extractive crawlers that show no downstream benefit and impose costs, teams have implemented CDN rate limiting or IP-based throttling.
  • Experimentation: Others use Clarity and similar signals to A/B test whether specific crawlers provide referral lift or conversion improvements, treating those bots as experimental channels rather than threats.

Critical assessment: strengths and open risks​

Microsoft’s Bot Activity offers important strengths:
  • Early signal detection. The upstream view provides an early look at how content is being accessed before downstream signals appear.
  • Operational utility. Path-level insights help engineering and content teams prioritize remediation and optimization.
  • Integration with existing analytics. When combined with Clarity’s session and heatmap tooling, Bot Activity can be used to correlate automated access with real-user behavior and conversion events.
But there are material risks and open questions:
  • Cost and data governance. Server-side log forwarding can raise cloud/CDN bills and data retention considerations.
  • Partial visibility. Bot Activity captures what hits the CDN/edge you forward; it won’t see every form of autonomous access (e.g., private tenant agent activity that never touches those endpoints).
  • Commercial and legal friction. The policy and market frameworks for monetizing retrieval access are unsettled; more measurement may sharpen negotiating positions but won’t automatically resolve revenue sharing or copyright disputes.
Publishers should therefore adopt Bot Activity as part of a broader program — pairing measurement with defensive controls, legal strategy, and controlled experiments to determine whether automated access creates real downstream value for their sites.

Conclusion​

Microsoft’s Clarity Bot Activity reframes bot traffic as first-class telemetry: server-side logs, CDN integrations, and new metrics give site owners the ability to see how AI agents and crawlers actually touch their infrastructure. That visibility is the practical distinction between guessing about extraction and making data-driven decisions about capacity, access control, and monetization. At the same time, the numbers reported so far — rapid percentage growth from a small base and elevated conversion rates in some publisher samples — are directional, sample-sensitive, and must be interpreted alongside independent datasets and your own A/B experiments. For publishers, the immediate priority is not to react to headlines but to instrument, measure, and run experiments: connect logs selectively, baseline bot load, map value by path, and then decide whether to block, meter, or partner — using Clarity’s Bot Activity to make those choices with evidence instead of intuition. The web is becoming agentic and programmatic; making automated consumption visible is now table stakes. Microsoft’s Bot Activity is a useful new tool in that effort — but transparency, careful interpretation, and cross‑vendor corroboration are necessary to turn those early signals into sustainable publisher outcomes.
Source: MediaPost Microsoft Exposes AI Bot Site Traffic
 
Click to expand...
Microsoft’s Clarity has quietly turned a blind spot into a dashboard: a new “Bot Activity” (also called AI Bot Activity) feature surfaces server‑side evidence of AI crawlers, verified bots, and automated agents hitting web properties — and it does so with an explicit focus on the earliest observable signal in the AI content lifecycle, the crawl itself.

Background​

AI assistants and LLM‑powered platforms are no longer hypothetical traffic channels; they are an emerging discovery surface that can locate, summarize, and — in some cases — drive users back to publisher sites. Microsoft’s own Clarity analytics team reported rapid growth in AI‑origin referrals across a sample of more than 1,200 publisher and news domains, finding that referrals from platforms such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, and Google Gemini rose by roughly 155% over an eight‑month window while converting at materially higher rates than traditional channels. Those midstream and downstream signals created a clear measurement gap: what happens upstream, when bots crawl and ingest content, was still largely invisible to most site operators. Clarity’s Bot Activity dashboard addresses that gap by treating crawler and agent requests as first‑class telemetry rather than background noise. Instead of relying solely on client‑side instrumentation (which misses server‑side bots), the feature ingests server or CDN logs, classifies automated requests, and exposes operator‑level and path‑level metrics intended to help publishers answer whether automated access is productive, extractive, or simply creating cost and load. Microsoft frames this as “earliest observable interaction” data — the crawl that precedes grounding, citation, or referral traffic.

What Bot Activity is — the dashboard and the data​

Microsoft designed Bot Activity to be an analytics card in the Clarity AI Visibility suite that surfaces several focused metrics. These are not heuristic guesses from client JavaScript; they are server‑side classifications derived from CDN and server logs forwarded to Clarity.
Key metrics and views:
  • Bot operator — shows which AI platforms and operators are requesting content most frequently, with a default focus on AI‑related bots. This metric is expressed as the share of total requests attributable to bots versus human users.
  • AI request share — the percentage of total requests that originate from AI bots; useful because it measures automated access proportionally against overall traffic.
  • Bot activity metric — groups automated requests by the bot’s likely purpose (indexing, retrieval preparation, embedding generation, developer tooling, etc., helping to infer why the crawl happened.
  • Path requests — aggregates automated requests at the path level (HTML pages, images, JSON endpoints, XML, and other assets) so site owners can see which URLs attract the highest automated attention.
These views are explicitly positioned as observational signals rather than proof that content was used in an AI response. Bot requests indicate access, not grounding, citation, or referral. That distinction matters because a high‑volume crawl may never translate into downstream value, and conversely, a small number of targeted requests might yield outsized exposure inside an assistant.

How Clarity collects this data (and what it costs)​

Bot Activity relies on request‑level server logs forwarded to Clarity via supported CDN or server integrations. Microsoft lists supported integrations and onboarding steps in its AI Visibility settings in Clarity; WordPress installations using the latest Clarity plugin receive the feature by default. The server‑side approach allows Clarity to see requests that client‑side analytics cannot detect, making bot classification both more complete and more reliable. Important operational realities and cost notes:
  • The integration forwards request logs from CDNs such as Cloudflare, Fastly, and Amazon CloudFront (and WordPress when using the plugin). That forwarding typically uses each provider’s logging pipeline (LogPush, Firehose, etc.
  • Forwarding and processing server logs can incur costs from the CDN or cloud provider depending on log volume, regional data egress, and any intermediary data streams; Microsoft explicitly warns that connecting integrations may result in additional costs billed by the provider. Clarity itself does not charge for AI Visibility, but the external logging pipeline may.
  • Disconnecting the integration removes the Bot Activity dashboard but does not retroactively erase historical data already ingested; full stop of forwarding requires provider‑side changes (deleting LogPush jobs, disabling Firehose, uninstalling WordPress plugin, etc.
These technical trade‑offs are central: organizations must weigh the value of an upstream crawl signal against the operational and financial costs of shipping request logs at scale.

Why publishers and site owners should care​

The Bot Activity signal is useful for multiple, discrete use cases that have become increasingly important as AI intermediaries multiply.
  • Infrastructure planning and performance tuning. High‑volume automated access can impose unexpected load on origin servers, increase bandwidth costs, and require cache policy adjustments. Knowing which paths are most heavily crawled helps prioritize caching, rate‑limiting, or dedicated routing.
  • Content strategy and prioritization. If bots consistently scrape certain article types or API endpoints, publishers can prioritize those assets for structured metadata, canonical tagging, or monetization experiments intended to capture downstream AI visibility.
  • Measurement of extraction vs. attribution. Bot Activity helps answer whether a site’s content is being ingested by AI systems without producing citations or clicks. Paired with citation or referral metrics, it can reveal content that’s “extracted for free” and may motivate changes in metadata, paywall rules, or robots policy.
  • Security and fraud detection. Some automated traffic is malicious or wasteful (scrapers, credential stuffing, fake sessions). Classification reduces noise in behavioral analytics and helps identify suspicious automated behavior.
Clarity’s earlier analysis of downstream behavior also emphasizes why publishers ought not to ignore AI referrals: although AI referrals remain a small percentage of total sessions (under 1% in the sample Microsoft analyzed), those sessions convert at materially higher rates — a pattern that recasts the problem from “lost clicks” to “high‑value click capture.” Bot Activity gives publishers the upstream signal needed to test whether their content is even being considered by these assistants.

Technical deep dive: what server logs reveal and what they don’t​

Server logs contain rich signals: user agent strings, request frequency and patterns, IP addresses and ASN info, referrers, request headers, and cached vs origin hits. Clarity ingests these fields to identify and classify bots and AI operators. Because classification occurs on request metadata and operator‑level fingerprints, it can separate known verified bot identities from generic scraper fleets.
That said, several technical caveats remain:
  • Identification limitations. Bot operator classification relies on recognized operator‑level fingerprints and signals from CDNs. Proprietary or stealthy crawlers may spoof user agents or rotate addresses, making deterministic classification imperfect. Microsoft documents the approach but does not publish full matching heuristics, so absolute accuracy cannot be externally verified. Treat classification as a high‑value signal, not an infallible truth.
  • Coverage gaps. Server‑side logging only reveals requests routed through the connected CDNs or origin. If a portion of traffic bypasses the logging pipeline (for example, via third‑party caches, proxies, or platforms that don’tt forward logs), it will not be represented.
  • No automatic blocking. Clarity’s Bot Activity provides visibility and intelligence but does not enforce rules; blocking, throttling, or access policy changes must be implemented by the site operator via robots.txt, firewall rules, or CDN rate‑limiting. Clarity’s docs explicitly state Bot Activity is informational and not a mitigation tool.
Because of these realities, Bot Activity is strongest when combined with operational controls: CDN rules, WAF policies, robots metadata, and downstream citation/referral measurement.

Opportunities: how to turn bot telemetry into strategy​

Bot Activity unlocks several tactical plays for publishers and site operators.
  • Prioritize content that bots repeatedly access for structured data and improved machine‑readable metadata to increase the odds of being surfaced with attribution in AI answers.
  • Use path request data to configure aggressive caching on heavily crawled assets while keeping dynamic endpoints more tightly controlled behind authentication or rate limits.
  • Create a small experiment bucket: expose select pages with richer context or canonical signals, track whether those pages later surface as citations in AI assistants, and compare conversion attribution. This tight loop converts upstream signals into midstream/ downstream outcomes.
  • Use operator‑level breakdowns to understand which AI ecosystems (Copilot, Perplexity, Gemini, ChatGPT, etc. are showing interest in your content and prioritize partnerships or syndication accordingly.
Operational checklist (short):
  • Enable Bot Activity via your Clarity project and connect the supported CDN or update the WordPress plugin.
  • Review cost implications with your CDN provider for log forwarding.
  • Map high‑volume paths to caching and rate‑limit rules.
  • Run controlled experiments with metadata and canonical tags to measure midstream and downstream effects.

Risks, privacy, and policy considerations​

Bot Activity is powerful, but it raises questions publishers must address carefully:
  • Privacy and data governance. Forwarding request logs can expose IP addresses, geo signals, and request headers to a third party. Organizations must validate data residency, retention policies, and contractual terms with CDN vendors and Clarity to ensure compliance with privacy regimes such as GDPR, CCPA, and corporate policy. Microsoft’s integration docs outline disconnection and data handling mechanics but do not obviate the need for legal review.
  • Cost vs. benefit. Logging at scale is not free. For sites with millions of daily requests, Cloudflare LogPush or AWS Firehose can produce substantial charges. Clarity does not bill for the feature, but CDNs and cloud providers do. Sites should project expected log volumes before enabling integrations.
  • Potential for misclassification. False positives or false negatives in bot classification can lead to misguided policy changes if teams treat the dashboard as absolute. Cross‑validation with other telemetry and manual sampling is advisable.
  • Competitive and legal exposure. Visibility into which operators are crawling content could inform pricing, licensing, or negotiated terms with AI platforms; it could also create tension if publishers conclude their content is being systematically extracted without fair recompense. Bot Activity provides the evidence — but resolving commercial disputes is a different problem.

Practical guidance for WindowsForum readers and IT teams​

WindowsForum’s audience includes site operators, Windows administrators, and independent publishers who may host WordPress, IIS, or cloud‑native sites. Practical steps for this readership:
  • For WordPress sites: ensure the Microsoft Clarity plugin is updated to the latest version; Bot Activity is enabled by default on recent versions, removing friction for small publishers. Review hosting plans to estimate logging costs.
  • For IIS/Azure or on‑prem Windows hosts: work with your CDN or reverse proxy to configure log forwarding. Azure Front Door, Azure CDN, and other Microsoft cloud services have their own logging and export mechanisms; validate that the pipeline to Clarity aligns with retention and compliance requirements. If you use CloudFront, Fastly, or Cloudflare as a fronting layer, follow the provider‑specific steps in Clarity’s disconnection docs to understand the required LogPush or Firehose jobs.
  • Security ops should treat Bot Activity as an additional signal in the SOC toolkit. Patterns of high‑frequency requests, odd referrers, and unusual header fingerprints can be integrated into WAF rules or SIEM dashboards.
  • Finance and procurement teams should request a cost estimate from CDN providers for log export and processing; for large properties, the difference can be material and should be accounted for in budgets.

Cross‑checking the headline claims​

Microsoft’s own messaging about the 155% growth and higher conversion rates comes from Clarity platform analysis and has been widely amplified across trade press and industry blogs. Multiple independent writeups summarized the same figures and methodology: an analysis of 1,200+ publisher sites, an eight‑month growth window, and a one‑month conversion snapshot showing AI referrals converting at substantially higher rates than search, direct, and social in the sampled data. Those secondary reports mirror Microsoft’s claims, but the underlying dataset and sample selection belong to Microsoft’s platform telemetry, so independent verification of the numbers requires either third‑party replication or publisher‑level corroboration. Readers should therefore treat the headline multipliers (155% growth, “3x conversion”) as real and meaningful within Clarity’s sample while recognizing the metrics are sample‑dependent. Where independent corroboration exists, it’s directional rather than exact: industry commentaries and other analytics vendors report similar trends — that AI referrals are growing fast from a small base and that those referrals tend to show high intent — but the precise growth and conversion multiples vary by study. That nuance matters when applying the numbers to your own property: your domain’s mix, content vertical, and user behavior will determine whether AI referrals are a rounding error or a strategic channel.

Limitations and unanswered questions​

Bot Activity is a significant step forward in measurement, but several open questions remain:
  • What portion of AI‑agent behavior remains invisible because platforms don’t crawl the web in ways observable from CDN logs? Some AI systems rely on licensed datasets, private indexes, or proprietary connectors that don’t show up as standard crawler requests. Bot Activity measures what it can observe; it cannot report on closed or private ingestion pipelines.
  • How precise is operator classification long term? Operators may change infrastructure, use proxies, or obfuscate fingerprints. The feature will require continuous updates to remain accurate. Microsoft indicates ongoing expansion of integrations and signals, but vendors’ arms races with crawlers continue.
  • Will visibility prompt new commercial behaviors? If publishers identify systematic extraction without citation, it could accelerate calls for licensing or platform‑level monetization. Bot Activity provides evidence that could be used in negotiations, but the legal and regulatory terrain is still unsettled.
These limitations underline the practical approach: use Bot Activity as a powerful operational signal, not a final verdict.

Conclusion​

Microsoft Clarity’s Bot Activity dashboard is a pragmatic, technically grounded response to a measurement gap created by the rise of AI intermediaries. By pulling server‑side logs into an analytics surface that classifies operator, purpose, and path‑level access, Clarity gives publishers and operators the upstream visibility they need to decide whether automated access is valuable, wasteful, or risky. The feature is not a silver bullet — it costs to operate, can be incomplete, and requires governance and policy decisions to act on — but it turns previously hidden crawl behavior into actionable telemetry. For site owners and Windows‑centric IT teams, the immediate takeaway is straightforward: evaluate the integration, project the logging costs, and treat Bot Activity as part of a broader measurement stack that links upstream crawl signals to midstream citations and downstream referral performance. Those linkages, more than any single percentage or multiplier, will determine whether AI‑driven crawling is a new source of value or a new source of cost.
Source: MediaPost Microsoft Exposes AI Bot Site Traffic
 
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