Microsoft Clarity has been one of the easiest tools to add to a website: free heatmaps, session recordings, rage-click detection, and AI summaries, with no paid tiers. Paste a script and you're done.
That changed for European traffic on October 31, 2025, when Microsoft started enforcing consent signals for visits from the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland. If you run Clarity and some of your visitors are in those regions, this matters — both for compliance and for how much of your data you actually get.
This post explains what changed, what happens when visitors don't consent, how to set Clarity up correctly, and when you'd be better off measuring with something that doesn't need consent at all.
What changed
Clarity uses cookies to recognize a visitor across pages and sessions. That's what powers session recordings, funnels, and returning-visitor metrics. Under European law, storing or reading cookies like these generally requires the visitor's consent unless the cookie is strictly necessary for something the visitor asked for — and analytics usually isn't.
For a long time, the responsibility for getting that consent sat with the website owner, and plenty of sites ran Clarity before (or without) asking. Microsoft has now built the requirement into the product. Per Microsoft's own documentation, starting October 31, 2025, Clarity enforces consent signal requirements for page visits from the EEA, UK, and Switzerland, and a valid consent signal is required for full functionality in those regions.
In practice:
- No consent signal, no Clarity cookies. For visitors in those regions, Clarity won't set its cookies until it receives a signal that analytics storage was granted. If a visitor declines, existing Clarity cookies are removed.
- Cookie-dependent features are limited. Microsoft notes that features which rely on cookies — such as session recordings and funnels — may be limited for visitors without consent.
- Everyone else is unaffected by this change. Visitors from outside those regions are handled as before (though your own local laws still apply).
Why it matters for your data
The obvious effect is compliance: if you run Clarity on European traffic without a working consent setup, you're now visibly out of line with how Microsoft expects it to be used.
The less obvious effect is on your numbers. Once consent is enforced, your Clarity data only describes the visitors who clicked "accept". How many that is depends heavily on your banner design, your audience, and the country — but it's rarely everyone, and the people who decline aren't a random sample. Privacy-conscious visitors, some mobile users, and returning customers in a hurry all behave differently from the people who accept.
That creates two problems:
- Gaps. Heatmaps and recordings are built on a subset of your European traffic, so a page that looks quiet might just be under-measured.
- Bias. If the people who decline behave differently, the patterns you see can be skewed, not just smaller.
Neither is a reason to panic. Both are reasons to be careful about drawing conclusions from European behavior data alone.
There's also the data-sharing question
Consent banners describe what happens to visitor data, so it's worth knowing what Clarity does with it. Under Clarity's terms, you and Microsoft are independent controllers of the personal data it collects — Microsoft isn't only processing it on your behalf. Microsoft's own suggested privacy disclosure for sites using Clarity begins:
"We improve our products and advertising by using Microsoft Clarity…"
That's the trade behind the free price. It's a legitimate one, but your privacy notice and your consent banner should describe it accurately, and some organizations — especially in regulated sectors — decide it isn't a trade they want to make.
How to set up Clarity correctly for EU and UK visitors
If Clarity is the right tool for you, here's the checklist.
1. Find out how much traffic is affected
Check what share of your visitors come from the EEA, UK, and Switzerland. If it's a few percent, the data gap is a footnote. If it's half your traffic, it shapes what Clarity can tell you.
2. Use a consent management platform that sends Clarity's signal
Clarity needs an explicit consent signal, not just a banner on the page. Microsoft provides a consent API (version 2) for this, and many consent management platforms — CookieYes, CookieHub, OneTrust, and others — now send the signal for you once Clarity is configured as an analytics tool. Check your platform's documentation for "Microsoft Clarity" specifically.
3. Make sure Clarity waits for the decision
The default state for European visitors should be "not granted" until they choose. If your banner loads after Clarity, or your tag manager fires Clarity on every page regardless, fix the order.
4. Test it
Open your site from a European location (or a VPN), decline consent, and confirm Clarity sets no cookies. Then accept, and confirm recordings start. Repeat after any change to your banner or tag setup.
5. Update your privacy notice
Name Clarity, link to Microsoft's privacy statement, and describe the data sharing honestly. Microsoft recommends including a disclosure on any site that uses Clarity.
When a cookieless tool is the better fit
Consent-based tools are the right choice when you genuinely need what only cookies can provide — like watching an individual session replay to debug a confusing checkout. But many teams run Clarity for something simpler: to see where people click, how far they scroll, and how much traffic each page gets.
For that job, a cookieless tool avoids the consent dependency entirely. Because it stores nothing on the visitor's device and doesn't build a persistent identifier, it can usually count every visitor — including those who would have declined a banner — and keep the data out of advertising ecosystems.
The trade-off is real and worth stating plainly: cookieless analytics works in aggregate. You get click maps, scroll depth, traffic, sources, and conversions across all visitors, but not a replay of what one individual did.
A setup many teams land on:
- Cookieless analytics as the source of truth for traffic, conversions, and heatmaps, because it sees everyone.
- Clarity (with consent) for occasional replay debugging, accepting that it only covers consenting visitors.
Or drop Clarity altogether if aggregate heatmaps answer your questions.
How Ometra handles this
Ometra is cookieless by design. It sets no cookies, stores no IP addresses, and counts unique visitors with a daily-rotating hash that can't be linked across days or sites. Its heatmaps show where visitors click and how far they scroll in aggregate, with no session recording, and your data is never used for advertising. That's why most sites don't need a consent banner for Ometra — though privacy law is fact-specific, so confirm your own situation.
If you're comparing options, we put together an honest roundup of the best Microsoft Clarity alternatives, including when Clarity itself is still the right choice.
FAQ
Does Microsoft Clarity require cookie consent? For visitors from the EEA, UK, and Switzerland, Clarity has enforced consent signals since October 31, 2025. Without a valid signal, it doesn't set its cookies and some features are limited. Elsewhere, whether you need consent depends on local law.
Is Microsoft Clarity GDPR compliant? It can be used in a GDPR-compliant way if you collect valid consent, send Clarity the consent signal, and disclose its use — including that Microsoft acts as an independent controller of the data. Compliance depends on your setup, not the tool alone.
Will Clarity still work without consent? For EEA, UK, and Swiss visitors who haven't consented, Clarity won't set cookies, and cookie-dependent features such as session recordings and funnels may be limited.
What's the best way to measure European traffic without a consent banner? Use a cookieless analytics tool that doesn't store anything on the visitor's device or build persistent identifiers. You'll get aggregate traffic, conversion, and heatmap data for all visitors, without individual session replays.
This article is general information, not legal advice. Clarity's behavior is based on Microsoft's documentation as of the date above; check Microsoft's current documentation before making changes.