Microsoft Advertising has announced several updates to give advertisers more visibility into AI search performance and make it easier to test changes to Performance Max campaigns. The updates include deeper AI visibility reporting in Microsoft Clarity, new ad preview capabilities, and Performance Max experiments. For brands currently adapting to the change in the way people are discovering information, the AI visibility reporting is particularly useful. It gives us more insight into where a brand appears in AI-generated experiences and which topics drive those mentions.
Topic Insights Added to AI Visibility Reporting
Microsoft is expanding its AI Visibility reporting suite in Clarity with a new Topic Insights feature. Rather than showing individual citations as it did before, the report groups citations by topic so advertisers can understand how AI systems are interpreting their brand and content. The report can help identify:
- Which topics AI systems associate with your brand
- How frequently those topics generate citations
- Where competitors are appearing but your brand has less visibility
- Which areas of your content may need improvement
The reporting gives us a far more comprehensive overview of how a brand is represented across AI search. If a business is consistently cited for one area but rarely appears for another commercially important topic, that could highlight an opportunity to create or improve content around it.
AI Reporting Metrics
The updated report includes three key metrics it didn’t previously provide:
- Share of authority – How often your domain is cited compared with competing domains
- Citation share – How frequently your domain appears as a cited source
- Grounding queries – The searches an AI system performs to retrieve information before generating its response
Grounding queries could be particularly useful for paid search. We can compare them against existing search terms to identify potential keyword opportunities, while share of authority shows where competitors are gaining visibility. These findings could then inform ad creative or landing page messaging.
Google appears to be moving in a similar direction. Its Generative AI reports in Search Console now seem to be appearing in more regions, although Google hasn’t announced a global rollout yet. Where available, the report shows impressions in generative AI features, which URLs appear in AI experiences, the countries your citations appear in, and your hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly performance. The report doesn’t provide click or query data. However, it can show which pages are appearing in AI experiences and how AI visibility changes over time. The reports currently appear only for sites with enough impression data, although Google hasn’t published a specific impression threshold to unlock the report.
Preview Hub Updates and Performance Max Testing Options
Microsoft is expanding its Preview Hub. The new functionality allows advertisers to preview Performance Max ads and Bing search placements. Advertisers can generate shareable preview links to see and share how ads will appear before spending begins. This allows you to spot formatting or messaging issues before the campaign goes live. Before, advertisers had to rely on screenshots once ads were live. The previews cover placements across Bing, MSN, and Outlook.
Microsoft is also introducing more ways to test its AI-powered Performance Max campaigns before making any significant changes. There are two experiment types:
- Upgrade experiments – Compare an existing Search or Shopping campaign with Performance Max after migration
- Uplift experiments – Measure the additional impact of introducing Performance Max along with other campaigns
These experiments give us a more controlled way to assess whether Performance Max is improving paid media performance. Microsoft recommends allowing up to 12 weeks before evaluating an experiment and having at least 30 conversions in the previous 30 days before launching a test. It also recommends keeping campaign settings, product groups, and bidding targets consistent between the test and control groups.
The Final Word
These updates give us better evidence to work from as a PPC agency. AI visibility reporting can show where your brand is being cited and where competitors have an advantage, while the new preview and testing tools allow us to make changes without immediately committing an entire campaign budget. The main opportunity here is connecting all these new insights.
If AI reporting shows that competitors are consistently being cited around a particular topic, that can inform both your SEO and paid search activity. Performance Max experiments let us test whether a change produces incremental value before rolling it out more widely. Better data on where brands appear, what’s driving visibility, and how paid campaigns are performing alongside it gives us a much stronger basis for deciding what’s working and what needs optimising.
If you’d like to discuss your paid media strategy or understand more about your AI visibility, we’d love to chat. Feel free to get in touch.