What is this, and why should I care?
In early 2025, Microsoft updated its Clarity product to enhance user privacy. They began by generating warnings when Clarity projects collected cookies without consent.
On October 31, 2025 they will begin enforcing cookie restrictions, so if you haven’t started collecting consent from your users – you won’t be able to use cookies for Clarity anymore.
VisualSP has already disabled cookies in your Clarity project by default to simplify Clarity management for you.
Nothing changes now. You will still see aggregated click data, session recordings, and heatmaps – but will face a few limitations. Tracking user behavior across multiple pages or identifying returning users will be restricted without cookie data, making it harder to understand broad user journeys.
NOTE: We have only made changes to Clarity projects that we setup for you. You will have to decide how to configure other Clarity projects you may have created on your own.
Done. Good work. Now go have an actual, chewy cookie.
Or, read on if you prefer the longer explanation.
What is Clarity, and where are my cookies…?
Your VisualSP or Clarity Connect 365 subscription can be configured to make Clarity API calls on your behalf wherever you use the VisualSP panel to support a web application. This greatly simplifies the process of implementing Microsoft Clarity.
When this Clarity integration is enabled, it collects information from various sources to help you understand what is happening in your platforms:
- Common information that’s always available from every browser session (like browser version, city / state, referrer page…),
- Custom tags from the VisualSP system (like if a feature was used), and
- Potentially, cookies placed on the user’s system for more consistent tracking, such as an anonymous user id. (This is where Microsoft’s change comes into play.)
We have proactively disabled that last bullet point from projects we share with you. When your project is not collecting cookies, then no further steps are needed.
Why would I not want cookies?
VisualSP customers are likely to be using Clarity for a broad selection of sites. If cookie consent had to be obtained for each of those, it would likely create a poor user experience and significant complexity for you to manage.
We have already reset each Clarity project we setup for you to not use cookies at all going forward. This greatly simplifies the requirements for you as the customer.
NOTE: As admins of your Clarity projects, you can change this setting if you wish. However, it should be considered best practice to disable cookies for all Clarity projects that are integrated with a VisualSP subscription.
How does the lack of cookies affect your Clarity dashboard?
When configured to not use cookies, your Clarity project will still collect the data that is most likely to be useful for analyzing interactions with specific features, tools, and pages. You will still see aggregated click data, heatmaps, and session recordings.
However, disabling cookies introduces the following changes in the data you will see going forward:
Sessions will be shorter and more specific
Without cookies, each page visit will be tracked as a single browsing session instead of combining a string of multiple page visits into a broader session.
Before disabling cookies:
After disabling cookies:
This imposes limitations for some advanced filtering scenarios, like sessions where someone visited both the home page and the profile page. (Referrer page is still tracked, since it is part of the common contextual information always provided by the browser.)
In many ways, this makes heatmaps more helpful – because it becomes easier to filter sessions for a specific page and then overlay clicks more consistently for that one page.
Limitations to identify returning users
Cookies help determine whether a user is ‘new’ or ‘returning’ by assigning a consistent and anonymous user id to sessions. Without this capability, you lose insight into user-specific history.
After disabling cookies, new User IDs are assigned to each page visit, even if it is the same user:
See Microsoft’s more detailed documentation here:
Changes to Clarity reporting without Cookie Consent
NOTE: VisualSP has a separate configuration option to allow you to push the activated username from your subscription as a custom tag when calling the Clarity API. This does not require cookies and is therefore not relevant to the changes being described here. You must determine whether your organization’s regulatory and compliance requirements allow for this setting to be used.