TL;DR: Microsoft Clarity is a free session-recording and heatmap tool with no traffic limits, and any site that asks visitors to do something should run it. Analytics tells you how many people left. Clarity shows you the page they left from and what they tried first. The real costs are page speed and privacy setup.
The one-sentence answer: Microsoft Clarity records how real visitors scroll, click and give up on your website, then summarizes that into heatmaps and frustration signals, and Microsoft charges nothing for it.
We've run Clarity on clickwerxs.com since August 13, 2026. In the 30 days to September 26 it excluded 86 bot sessions, flagged dead clicks in 11.27% of the remaining sessions, and showed us that most of the zero-click sessions entering our quote page came from four repeat visitor IDs.
None of that shows up in a standard GA4 report.
This is the hub for our Clarity series. Each section below covers one part of the product in a paragraph or two and links to the full guide where one exists.
What is Microsoft Clarity?
Microsoft Clarity is a behavior analytics tool. You add a small script to your site, and Clarity records each visitor's session: every scroll, click, tap and page change. It then aggregates those sessions into heatmaps, a dashboard of frustration signals, and an AI summary layer called Copilot.
Microsoft's documentation defines a recording as "a visual way to watch real user interactions on your site or app."
The best one-line description comes from inside Microsoft. Priyanka Ved, then a Senior Product Manager for Clarity, said in an October 7, 2021 interview on the Clarity blog: "Clarity helps you put the why behind the what!"
That's the frame for the whole series. Google Analytics answers "what happened." Clarity answers "why."
What does Microsoft Clarity cost?
Nothing. Microsoft's FAQ is unusually direct: "Clarity is a free service forever. You never encounter traffic limits or are compelled to upgrade to a paid version." The same FAQ promises "No sampling (that is, tracking only a portion of your site's traffic)."
There is a limit, and it's on history. Per Microsoft's data retention page, "Playback data is retained for 30 days. Labeled or favorited sessions are retained for 9 months. Heatmaps data is retained for 9 months." After 30 days Clarity keeps "1% of your recordings or 10 recordings per day, whichever is higher." If a recording matters, favorite it that week.
The costs you do pay are not in dollars:
- Page speed. The script does real work on the visitor's device. The first time Clarity actually ran on our site, our mobile Lighthouse gate failed at 0.89 against a 0.90 floor. Our install guide for Clarity without tanking your PageSpeed score covers the fix.
- Privacy setup. Masking, consent and your privacy policy all need attention before you ship (see the privacy section below).
- Your time. A recording tool you never open costs nothing and teaches nothing.
Who should run Microsoft Clarity, and who shouldn't?
Our position: any site that exists to produce an action (a quote request, a booking, a call, a purchase) should run Clarity. The alternative is guessing why the form isn't getting submitted.
The strongest argument against it is traffic volume, and it's a fair one. Our site logged 142 human sessions in 30 days. At that scale, a heatmap is a handful of clicks, and a 0.70% rage-click rate is one session. Patterns need numbers we don't have yet, and anyone who tells you a 16-session dead-click rate is a trend is overselling it.
We still run it, because individual recordings work at any volume. One recording of a visitor tapping a button that does nothing is a bug report, whether your site gets 140 sessions or 140,000.
Two cases where we'd hesitate:
- Pages that collect health, financial or other sensitive information, until you've set masking to Strict and tested it.
- Sites with a hard performance budget and no developer, where you can't control how the script loads.
Everything else, from a five-page contractor site to a store with a few hundred orders a month, gets more from Clarity than it costs. The setup takes an afternoon.
What did Clarity show us in 30 days?
Our dashboard for the 30 days to September 26, 2026:
| Metric | clickwerxs.com |
|---|---|
| Sessions (humans) | 142 |
| Bot sessions excluded | 86 |
| Pages per session | 1.56 |
| Average scroll depth | 43.09% |
| Active time / total time | 2 min / 4.3 min |
| Dead clicks | 11.27% of sessions (16) |
| Quick backs | 3.52% (5) |
| Rage clicks | 0.70% (1) |
Five things we didn't know before.
Bots were 38% of what arrived. Clarity counted 142 sessions after excluding 86 bot sessions, so 86 of 228. A tool without bot filtering would have counted all 228 as human visits.
One in nine sessions hit a dead click. A dead click is a click that gets no response. Sixteen sessions included one, which means visitors in sixteen separate sessions tried to interact with something that looked clickable and wasn't. That's a list of design fixes. What each signal can point to, and what to check first, is in our guide to rage clicks, dead clicks and quick backs.
Our most-visited page was padded by four repeat visitors. The quote page led the dashboard's top-pages list. In the 100 most recent recordings, 27 sessions entered on the quote page and clicked nothing, and 23 of those came from four Clarity user IDs. That lesson is the whole of our session recordings guide.
Most of our sessions came from desktop browsers. Mobile Safari and Chrome Mobile together accounted for about 7% of sessions (at least one of those was a tablet). Chrome, which Clarity reports separately from Chrome Mobile, was 71.13%. For us, that means recording review starts on desktop.
Bing sent half as many sessions as Google. Of sessions with a search referrer, Google sent 26 and Bing sent 13. Bing is easy to ignore. Clarity made the case against ignoring it with our own traffic, and it's one reason we also track how AI answers cite us.
One JavaScript error, caught in a recording. Clarity logged a single error ("t.closest is not a function") in 0.70% of sessions and attached the recording to it. One session is a small number. It's also a bug we would never have seen otherwise, and Clarity links straight to the session where it fired.
How do Clarity session recordings work?
Clarity captures a session until the visitor goes quiet. Microsoft: "Clarity continues to capture actions until the user is inactive for 30 minutes, at which point the session ends."
The recordings list shows each session's entry page, exit page, duration, click count and page count, and you can sort it four ways: date, duration, clicks and pages. There's no "most frustrated first" sort. You build that yourself with filters, and that's the skill that separates useful recording review from wasted afternoons. Our guide to filters, segments and custom tags shows how.
In our 100 most recent recordings, 72 had zero clicks. Watching in date order means mostly watching nothing happen.
Can AI watch them for you? Partly. Copilot in Clarity offers "Session Insights" that generate "critical session takeaways in plain language," "Heatmaps Insights" that summarize across a page's heatmaps, and a Chat panel for questions about your project. The recordings page can summarize the top 10 recordings at once. We treat it as a second opinion on sessions we've already chosen.
Full method: how to watch 20 session recordings and learn something, not 200 and learn nothing.
What do heatmaps and frustration signals show?
Heatmaps aggregate many sessions onto one picture of a page. Microsoft lists five types: "Click maps, Scroll maps, Area maps, Conversion maps, and Attention maps." The scroll map is the one small businesses need first. It shows what share of visitors ever reach your call to action. Our site-wide average scroll depth was 43.09%, which suggests many visitors never reach a CTA at the bottom of a long page. Our guide to Clarity heatmaps walks through all five and how to keep them honest.
Frustration signals are Clarity's automatic flags on the dashboard. Microsoft's definitions:
- Rage click: "the user clicks multiple times in a clustered area in rapid succession."
- Dead click: "a user clicks on an element but gets no feedback in a reasonable amount of time."
- Quick back: a click that leaves the page, after which the user "returns to the original page or website under a certain threshold of time."
- Excessive scrolling: "higher amounts of vertical scrolling than the expected average."
- JavaScript errors: each error, with "recordings related to each error."
Each flag doubles as a recording filter. Filtering to dead clicks on one page is the fastest route from dashboard number to fixable problem. For the strategy side of fixing what you find, our guide to website conversion rate optimization covers the seven usual culprits.
What are Smart events and funnels in Clarity?
Smart events are actions Clarity detects without code. Microsoft: "Clarity automatically defines smart events for you, and you can customize them or define new events–all code-free." Our dashboard auto-detected "Submit form" in 12 sessions, "Request quote" in 10 and "Contact us" in 6.
It also reported "Checkout" in 4 sessions. clickwerxs.com has no checkout. The word does appear as a label in illustrations on our payments pages, which is our best guess at what Clarity matched. Review every auto-detected event before you build anything on it.
Funnels are "an ordered group of user actions, providing a clear view of user progression through each step of the flow," built from those events without code. A three-step funnel (landing page, quote page, form submitted) tells you which step loses people. Then you open the recordings of the people it lost.
How does Clarity fit with Google Analytics 4?
They answer different questions, so run both. GA4 counts sessions, sources and conversions. Clarity shows the individual sessions behind those counts.
Microsoft documents a native GA4 integration: you connect your GA4 account ID, measurement ID and property ID inside Clarity. Two limits worth knowing from Microsoft's page: "Clarity doesn't support segments in GA4," and "Clarity doesn't send playback URL to GA4 as it cannot accept High Cardinality rows." So your GA4 reports won't carry a link to the recording behind each row.
If you're still working out what GA4 should be measuring, start with the numbers in the signs your website is costing you customers, then use Clarity to explain them.
What is Clarity AI Visibility?
This is the newest part of the product and the least like the rest. It watches machines.
Bot Activity shows "which bots and AI systems request your site, how frequently they do so, and which content is most affected." It needs server-side logs, so you connect a supported server or CDN, and Microsoft warns that doing so "might result in additional costs depending on your provider, cloud platform, traffic volume, and regional configuration." On WordPress, Microsoft says the latest Clarity plugin enables it by default.
Read it for what it is. Microsoft says bot activity "doesn't indicate that content was retrieved, grounded, cited, or surfaced in AI generated responses." It's the earliest signal, to compare later against citations and referral traffic. We cover citation tracking, using Bing Webmaster Tools and GA4, in how to track AI citations. A dedicated guide to the Clarity dashboard is coming in this series.
Is Microsoft Clarity private enough for a business site?
For most service businesses, yes, with setup.
Masking is on by default. Microsoft: "Clarity masks sensitive content on your website by default and never captures anything that is masked or sent over the wire." The default mode is Balanced, where "we classify numbers and email addresses as sensitive content." Form inputs stay masked in every mode: "Content in the input boxes is masked in all modes and can't be customized." Ours runs on Balanced.
Consent signals matter in some regions. "Starting October 31, 2025, Clarity begins enforcing consent signal requirements for page visits originating from the European Economic Area (EEA), United Kingdom (UK), and Switzerland (CH)." Without a signal, Clarity keeps running but changes its reporting: "Sessions are counted as pageviews," and returning visitors look new. If you serve those visitors, pass the visitor's choice to Clarity through its consent API.
Data sale. Microsoft's FAQ: "Clarity doesn't sell data." Clarity's terms govern how Microsoft may otherwise use the data. Read them, and name Clarity in your privacy policy.
A full privacy and consent guide is part of this series. Until then, disclose it, keep masking at Balanced or stricter, and test your forms in a recording before you trust them.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Microsoft Clarity work in mobile apps?
Yes, through separate mobile SDKs. Microsoft's mobile SDK overview lists native Android and iOS, React Native and Flutter (Flutter 3.19.0 or later) on both platforms, and Cordova and Ionic on Android only. It also states there's "no traffic limit on data collected from the apps."
Can I install Clarity on more than one website?
Yes. Microsoft's FAQ says "there are absolutely no limits on the number of sites per account." Give each site its own project, so recordings and heatmaps never mix across domains.
Does Clarity slow down a website?
It can, slightly. Microsoft's 2021 performance test found almost no blocking time, but it also said "we cannot guarantee your site will not be affected in any way." On our site, the first deploy where Clarity ran failed our mobile Lighthouse gate at 0.89 against a 0.90 floor, which is why we changed how the script loads.
How long until Clarity shows data after I install it?
Minutes for the first recordings, hours for a dashboard worth reading. Microsoft's Shopify guide says to "allow a few hours for your dashboard to populate with data." Heatmaps need enough sessions on a page to mean anything, which on a low-traffic page can take weeks.
Can Clarity replace user testing?
No, and it isn't trying to. A recording shows what someone did. It can't show what they expected to happen or why they gave up, and you can't ask it a follow-up question. Use Clarity to decide which pages deserve a proper test with five real people, then use it again afterwards to check that the fix changed behavior.
Can I get Clarity data out into my own reports?
Yes. Microsoft documents a Data Export API and a dashboard download, and the recordings list has its own download button. Most small businesses never need more than the dashboard. If you report to a board or a client each month, exporting the headline numbers into the same sheet as GA4 saves a login.
Do I still need Google Analytics if I run Clarity?
Yes, for anything involving acquisition. Clarity reports referrers, but GA4 is where campaign attribution, conversion goals and ad platform connections live. Run both and connect them.
What to do next. Install Clarity with our page-speed-safe method, let it run for two weeks, then work through the session recordings guide. If you'd rather hand the whole job over, our web design team can set up Clarity the way we run it on our own site and walk you through what the recordings say. Start a conversation.
Sources
- Microsoft Learn, Clarity FAQ: "Clarity is a free service forever"; "No sampling"; "Clarity doesn't sell data"; "there are absolutely no limits on the number of sites per account." learn.microsoft.com (updated 2026-09-21, retrieved 2026-09-26)
- Microsoft Learn, Data retention: playback 30 days; labeled or favorited sessions and heatmaps 9 months. learn.microsoft.com (updated 2026-06-30, retrieved 2026-09-26)
- Microsoft Learn, Recordings overview: definition of a recording; 30-minute inactivity rule; post-30-day retention of "1% of your recordings or 10 recordings per day." learn.microsoft.com (page dated 2026-05-21, retrieved 2026-09-26)
- "Clarity for a Product Manager," Microsoft Clarity blog, October 7, 2021, interview with Priyanka Ved, then Senior Product Manager for Clarity. clarity.microsoft.com (retrieved 2026-09-26)
- Microsoft Learn, Semantic metrics: definitions of rage clicks, dead clicks, quick backs, excessive scrolling and JavaScript errors. learn.microsoft.com (page dated 2025-12-01, retrieved 2026-09-26)
- Microsoft Learn, Heatmaps overview: five heatmap types. learn.microsoft.com (page dated 2025-09-15, retrieved 2026-09-26)
- Microsoft Learn, Smart events and Funnels. learn.microsoft.com and learn.microsoft.com (pages dated 2025-12-01, retrieved 2026-09-26)
- Microsoft Learn, Copilot in Clarity overview. learn.microsoft.com (retrieved 2026-09-26)
- Microsoft Learn, GA4 integration. learn.microsoft.com (retrieved 2026-09-26)
- Microsoft Learn, Bot Activity overview. learn.microsoft.com (page dated 2026-07-30, retrieved 2026-09-26)
- Microsoft Learn, Masking and Clarity without cookie consent: default Balanced masking; consent enforcement for EEA, UK and Switzerland from October 31, 2025. learn.microsoft.com and learn.microsoft.com (retrieved 2026-09-26)
- Microsoft Learn, Mobile SDK overview. learn.microsoft.com (page dated 2026-08-31, retrieved 2026-09-26)
- Microsoft Clarity blog, "Does Clarity affect website performance?", November 23, 2021. Legacy benchmark. clarity.microsoft.com (retrieved 2026-09-26)
- Microsoft Learn, Shopify integration ("allow a few hours") learn.microsoft.com; Grouped session insights ("Summarize top 10 recordings") learn.microsoft.com; Data Export API learn.microsoft.com and dashboard download learn.microsoft.com. All retrieved 2026-09-26.
- ClickWerxs operator data: Clarity dashboard for clickwerxs.com, 30 days to September 26, 2026, and the 100 most recent recordings (September 3 to 25, 2026). Visitor IDs withheld.
Kaleb Dickhaut — Founder, ClickWerxs. Kaleb built ClickWerxs from the ground up, from payment processing ISO to the Command Center platform to the AI SEO methodology the blog runs on. He has onboarded hundreds of small businesses onto payment and CRM systems. linkedin.com/in/kaleb-dickhaut
Product details in this post reflect Microsoft's documentation as of September 26, 2026 and change often. ClickWerxs is not affiliated with Microsoft and earns revenue from the web design services described. This post reflects publicly available regulatory information as of the publication date. Regulations vary by jurisdiction and change frequently. This is not legal advice. Consult qualified legal counsel before making compliance decisions for your business.