Microsoft Clarity Not Recording? Causes, Checks and Fixes

Microsoft Clarity not recording shows up as a dashboard with no data, or as a recordings list with fewer sessions than the site’s traffic suggests. Find the row that matches what you see; every check in the third column comes from Microsoft’s own Clarity pages on Microsoft Learn, which I read on 4 November 2026.

Microsoft documents every row, but the checks are spread across the 11 Clarity pages on Learn linked in this post, and a Q&A thread on the error text can sit for months without an answer from Microsoft. A March 2024 question on Microsoft Q&A about “This part of the recording is unavailable. Error while retrieving data” has one reply, from December 2024: “9 months and still no answer from Microsoft support”. My view is that you should find the stage where the data stopped before you change any dashboard setting, and each stage in the diagram below has its own check.

Microsoft Clarity Not Recording Anything: Check the Install

Microsoft’s setup guide gives two ways to verify an installation:

1. Live users. Open the project. Once the script is added, Microsoft says you can view real-time data with the number of current live users, and select Watch now to see them.
2. The collect request. Right-click your page, select Inspect, open the Network tab and select the collect file. You should see POST requests to https://www.clarity.ms/collect while you interact with the site.

If no collect request appears, Microsoft’s troubleshooting installation page says to revisit Setup, then “Refresh the page after a few minutes” and check again. The same page covers the wrong-project case: go to Setup, Installation methods, Install manually, copy the code, and compare it with the script in your site’s <head>, checking the src in particular.

The timing lines on Microsoft’s pages do not all say the same thing, which matters when a new install looks empty:

Treat the collect request as the install test, since it reports on the page you have open, and give dashboard totals the few hours the FAQ allows. Two more install notes from the Clarity FAQ: a project spans several sites or subdomains only “if you included the tracking code from your project on all of them”, and on Shopify, “Design changes might cause the Clarity script to be removed.”

Microsoft Clarity Not Recording EEA, UK and Swiss Visitors

Since 31 October 2025, Clarity has required a consent signal for visits from the European Economic Area, the UK and Switzerland, and its Consent Mode page says Consent Mode “is enabled by default for all users originating from” those regions. The FAQ says Clarity uses IP address-based geolocation to decide who they are. Without the signal, this is what Microsoft’s pages say you lose:

• Consent API v2 page: “If consent is not granted, Clarity assigns a unique ID per page view and does not use cookies to persist session data.”
• FAQ: if a user visits page A and then page B, “Clarity treats these as two separate sessions”, and functions “like funnel tracking and session recordings, might be impacted.”
• Setup guide, with cookies off: “Recordings aren’t linked together into multi-page sessions.”

The FAQ adds the case that needs no work: if no users visit from the EEA, the UK or Switzerland, “there is no impact on your Clarity experience and no need to send an explicit consent signal.”

Read the Consent State in the Console

Microsoft’s verification step is to open the developer tools on your site, go to the Console tab and run:

clarity('metadata', (d, upgrade, consent) => {
  console.log('consentStatus:', consent);
}, false, true, true);

Before the visitor answers the banner, Consent Mode should print analytics_storage: "DENIED" and ad_storage: "DENIED"; after “accept all”, both read "GRANTED". Microsoft’s second test: clear cookies, decline consent, confirm the /collect calls still run, and check that no _clck or _clsk cookie was set.

Send the Signal Clarity Reads

The Consent API v2 page calls consentv2 “the latest and recommended method” and says the older Consent API “is planned for deprecation”. Its syntax:

window.clarity('consentv2', {
  ad_Storage: "granted",
  analytics_Storage: "granted"
});

The two pages spell the keys differently: the API page writes ad_Storage and analytics_Storage with lowercase values, while the console readout prints analytics_storage and ad_storage in lowercase with values in capitals. Use the API page’s spelling in the call, since that page defines the parameters. Your other routes, as Microsoft’s pages stood on 4 November 2026:

The Consent Mode page still says Clarity “currently integrates with CookieYes, with additional CMP support coming soon”, so check the CMP page for the current list. While Google Consent Mode support is still listed as coming soon, a CMP that is not on Microsoft’s list passes consent through the Consent API, which the Consent Mode page names for “a CMP not listed above” and links to the consentv2 page. On this site, a consent bridge reads the CMP’s ad and analytics storage choices and passes them to Clarity’s consentv2 call, as my comparison of Google Analytics alternatives describes.

Clarity Blocked by a Content Security Policy or an IP Block

Microsoft’s CSP page says “Clarity should usually work if your website doesn’t have a CSP”, and that with one, browsers block Clarity resources until you allow them. Its suggested change goes in default-src:

default-src 'self' https://*.clarity.ms https://c.bing.com 'unsafe-inline';

If you list hosts one by one instead, the page names https://www.clarity.ms, https://c.bing.com and the lettered hosts a.clarity.ms through z.clarity.ms, because Clarity balances load between environments. Microsoft’s example also carries 'unsafe-inline', so follow the page’s own tip before you paste it: “Consult your website manager while making changes to your CSP.” A blocked Clarity shows up as errors in the developer console.

An IP block is the opposite case: the script runs and Clarity drops the data on purpose. From Microsoft’s IP blocking page:

Does Clarity Record Every Session?

No: Microsoft’s Clarity FAQ says “Clarity tracks all sessions, but recordings might not be available for all sessions”, and that it records up to 100,000 sessions per project per day. The same FAQ lists “No sampling” among Clarity’s features, which it defines as “tracking only a portion of your site’s traffic”, so the gap Microsoft describes is in recordings, not in tracking. The gaps it does document:

• A thin filter set. The dashboard troubleshooting page says some sessions “can’t be visualized as the data received is insufficient to display a full playback experience”, and that this is common when few sessions sit in a filter set. Expanding the filters is its fix.
• Bot sessions. The setup guide says Clarity detects bot traffic by default and “excludes it from total session count and analytics”, with the excluded number shown at the top of the dashboard.
• No consent signal. The consent section above: without it, a two-page visit from the EEA becomes two sessions.
• Live view. The FAQ caps live viewing at “a maximum of 100 live sessions”.

Microsoft Clarity Not Showing CSS in Replays

A Clarity replay is rebuilt from the page’s content (the FAQ says it records “the DOM content” rather than video), so Clarity has to fetch your stylesheets and fonts itself. Microsoft’s recordings troubleshooting page lists the trouble spots:

The two troubleshooting pages disagree on caching. The recordings page says “Clarity supports resource versioning”, so a replay uses the stylesheet as it was when the session was recorded. The heatmap troubleshooting page says “Clarity doesn’t support resource versioning”, so a changed file at the same URL can render with the old cached copy. Microsoft’s recordings page recommends a new URL or file name for each updated stylesheet, which avoids the problem under either reading. To clear a cached file, the heatmap page says to email clarityMS@microsoft.com with a link to an affected recording or heatmap and the resource URL.

Blank Areas, Gray Images and Empty Click Maps

These come from how Clarity captures a page, so some are limits rather than faults:

• Blank boxes: the FAQ says Clarity “can’t render inside third-party ‘iFrame’ or ‘canvas’ elements”; for heatmaps, it captures clicks on first-party iframes only, “but not on third-party iFrames.”
• Gray images or videos: the FAQ says Clarity does not capture changes to continuously changing elements while the user is inactive, and they return to full colour when the user is active again.
• A click map with no clicks from a recording: the recordings troubleshooting page says heatmaps opened from a recording add two filters, the recording’s visited URL and its device type. Remove or adjust them.
• Low page views on a heatmap: the heatmap page lists the checks: script on every page, still installed after a redesign, 30 minutes since install, the correct URL, cleared filters, and the Time frame set to Today.

Once the clicks arrive, the colours still need reading; my guide to reading click and scroll heatmaps covers that part, and my five-tool marketing stack shows where Clarity sits beside GA4 and Search Console.

What to Send Microsoft If Clarity Is Still Missing Data

If you still see Microsoft Clarity not recording after the four checks in the diagram, contact Microsoft with the evidence those checks produced. Microsoft’s pages give three routes:

• The troubleshooting installation page: “Contact us if the issue persists”.
• The recordings troubleshooting page: email clarityMS@microsoft.com with a link to the recording or heatmap that does not render, and optionally the resource URLs you can see failing.
• The FAQ: in-app feedback through the smiley face button.

Include whether POST requests to /collect appear, what the consentStatus readout prints, and any console message about CSP or project settings. Those three lines tell support which stage stopped the data, which a screenshot of an empty dashboard cannot. Start with the collect request.