Melissa Connors digs into the DBCC CLONEDATABASE command:
Finally, keep in mind that because the clone is a read-only, empty database, you should be able to test repeatedly without updating statistics and skewing your results. Since I wanted to see this for myself, I executed a set of updates and selects against the SQLSentryData and SQLSentryDataClone databases. As a result of the lack of data and read-only database status, there were no actual updates in SQLSentryDataClone. Consequently, the statistics were updated in the SQLSentryData database, but remained the same in the SQLSentryDataClone database:
Read the whole thing.