Scrunch AI review: features, pricing and alternatives (2026)

Scrunch AI is an AI search visibility platform that tracks how ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Microsoft Copilot talk about your brand. It also reports how AI bots use your website, and on Enterprise it can serve those bots a cleaner copy of your pages. Sitecore bought it in June 2026. Core costs $250 monthly for 125 prompts. Enterprise is custom. It puts monitoring, bot analytics, site audits and content delivery in one place, which suits enterprise teams with people ready to act on its findings.

Scrunch's own walkthrough shows the catch. In its example, a brand appears in 45% of tracked AI answers while its competitors appear in 78%. The dashboard finds the gap. Closing it takes better pages, stronger Google rankings and mentions on the sites that ChatGPT and Google's AI answers already trust.

We're Searchmaxxed, a search team for law firms, clinics and premium builders. We sell no software, Scrunch included; we sell the work that closes that gap. Want your name in the answer? Start with us. If you want a dashboard for a team that's ready to do the work itself, Scrunch Core is a strong start.

What is Scrunch AI?

Scrunch AI is software that shows how AI engines talk about your brand, then helps you change what they read. The company now calls itself plain Scrunch. Buyers still search for Scrunch AI.

Sitecore announced on 3 June 2026 that it had acquired Scrunch, an AI customer experience platform. Chris Andrew is CEO of Scrunch, a Sitecore company. Before the deal, Scrunch raised $26 million from investors including Mayfield, Decibel, Homebrew and GTM Capital, according to its funding FAQ. It now runs as a standalone platform.

Who uses it? Scrunch says more than 500 brands and agencies do, and its enterprise page names Lenovo, ADP and Akamai among brands monitoring millions of prompts. Scrunch splits the product into three jobs. It observes what AI engines say about you and how their bots use your site. It helps you optimise pages with audits and ranked recommendations. And through Agent Pages, it delivers a cleaner copy of your pages straight to AI agents.

What does Scrunch AI do?

Scrunch is a prompt tracker first. It runs the prompts you choose through AI engines on a schedule. It then tells you four things: whether your brand appears, its place in each answer, the answer's tone and the sources behind it. Bot analytics, site audits and content delivery sit around that core. Scrunch's own pages describe each part:

Agent Traffic and Agent Pages plug into your CDN or host: Scrunch lists Akamai, AWS CloudFront, Cloudflare, Fastly, Vercel and WordPress. On HubSpot, Shopify, Webflow or Wix? You connect through a Cloudflare proxy.

How does Scrunch collect its data?

Scrunch says it uses browser automation and official platform APIs, picking the method engine by engine. New prompts run daily for their first 14 days, then refresh every 72 hours by default, and you can refresh any prompt on demand.

The counting is strict. A mention only counts when an answer names your brand outright, so a cited page that happens to mention you doesn't count. Scrunch argues that mirrors what a buyer sees. Its AI search volume comes from a third-party panel, and Scrunch calls that data "directional, not exact".

Set-up is fast. Scrunch says many customers, large enterprises included, are collecting data within a day. You enter your website, it drafts your competitors, personas and topics, and you can import keywords as a CSV to turn them into prompts.

How much does Scrunch AI cost?

Scrunch Core costs $250 monthly. Enterprise pricing is custom. Agencies get their own track, with Agency Core at $500 monthly and Agency Enterprise at a custom price. Those figures come from Scrunch's pricing page and pricing FAQ, both checked on 1 November 2026, and they match each other.

Read Core's limits before you start the trial. It tracks one country, one persona and one language, against five competitors, with three AI Search Trends topics and limited query fan-out. You also get a 25-page site map and one page optimisation a month. Support is by email.

The 7-day free trial gives you the full Core plan. It needs a credit card. Unless you cancel, it rolls into a paid subscription when the week ends, though enterprise teams can ask Scrunch for a custom evaluation instead.

How many prompts do you need on Core?

For most single-market B2B teams, 125 is enough. Scrunch publishes its own sizing rule: count your topic clusters, then write 12 to 15 questions for each. That's about eight to ten clusters.

Take a mid-sized cybersecurity vendor. It might track eight clusters: endpoint security, email security, SIEM, zero trust, compliance, pricing, integrations and alternatives to its biggest rival. Fifteen questions a cluster makes 120 prompts. That fits. Scrunch's own enterprise example runs 300 clusters to 4,500 prompts, which puts it firmly in Enterprise territory.

Then check the response cap. Four engines times 125 prompts makes 500 answers per full refresh, which means Core's 5,000 monthly responses cover about ten full refreshes. Ask Scrunch how a new prompt's first 14 daily runs count against it.

Is Scrunch's Agent Pages cloaking, and does it help in Google?

Scrunch says Agent Pages isn't cloaking, because AI agents get the same content in a cleaner format while Googlebot and Bingbot see your normal site. That second point decides where it helps. Agent Pages works on AI engines that fetch your pages live, while your real website still carries Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Scrunch's Agent Pages FAQ lays out the mechanics, and it's clever engineering. It sits at your CDN and spots AI retrieval bots from engines such as ChatGPT and Perplexity. It strips the code AI doesn't value, restructures the page and serves clean HTML, while people keep seeing your normal site.

Now look at Google's side. Its guide to AI features in Search says they're "rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems" and highlight content from the Search index. So the pages Googlebot crawls are the ones AI Overviews can quote, which means your real pages and their rankings still decide Google.

Scrunch's headline proof comes from Akamai. Akamai compared pages with Agent Pages switched on against similar pages without it. Sitecore's announcement reports a 364% rise in how often Akamai appeared in answers to non-branded prompts. Citations to Akamai content rose 218%.

Scrunch's docs add two practical notes worth knowing before you buy. First, Agent Pages comes only with the Enterprise plan. And when you edit a page in your CMS, you need to update the agent copy too. The agent copy lives apart from your site.

How should you read AI traffic in Scrunch and GA4?

Treat AI bot visits and AI referral clicks as two separate numbers. Both can mislead. Scrunch's Agent Traffic reads your CDN data and sorts bot visits into training, indexing and retrieval. Scrunch calls retrieval the highest intent, because a real person just asked an AI a question and the bot came looking for the answer.

AI Referrals connects to GA4 or Adobe Analytics and shows the sessions, landing pages and conversions that AI platforms send you. Scrunch notes that direct clicks miss most of the effect. Buyers often read an answer, then search your name or type in your address.

Before any AI traffic number reaches a board report, check that it's human. We found this on a client account:

A client's GA4 showed AI-assistant visits jump from 354 to 6,050 in a month. Almost none of it was real. About 5,700 came in three one-hour bursts: same 1920x1080 desktop Chrome, all new users, no referrer, about 20 seconds each, landing on two pages. Real AI traffic was 385 sessions against 354 the month before, roughly flat.

Any dashboard that reads GA4 inherits that noise. Look at the hour-by-hour pattern, the screen sizes and the time on page before you celebrate. A bot burst can dress a flat month up as a breakthrough.

Does Scrunch get your brand named in ChatGPT?

Scrunch shows you where you're missing. The answer itself changes only when its sources change: your pages, your Google rankings and what trusted sites say about you. Scrunch's recommendations, content editor and Agent Pages work on your own pages. For other sites, it links citation data to placement partners such as Noble and Stacker.

Most of the lift still comes from people doing SEO, content and digital PR, aimed at sources more concentrated than most teams expect. In one of our own panels:

Across 900 ChatGPT answers about Australian agencies, a single third-party "best agencies" site was cited in 168 of them. The next three were a second listicle, Semrush's agency directory and Clutch. If you want to be recommended, the job is getting onto the handful of pages the model already trusts.

A tracker like Scrunch will show you that short list for your category. Getting onto that list, and ranking in Google for the questions behind it, is the work that moves the number each month. Our guide to showing up in AI search walks through it step by step. It's also the job our AI search optimisation service does for clients.

What are the best Scrunch AI alternatives?

The right Scrunch alternative depends on your budget, the engines you need and the suites you already pay for. Prices below are monthly and come straight from each vendor's own public pricing page, exactly as they stood on 1 November 2026.

Profound

Profound is the closest like-for-like for enterprise teams. Its free trial runs 50 preset prompts daily for 7 days on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. Enterprise tracks up to nine answer engines, with SSO and SOC 2. Both plans include agent analytics through the same kinds of CDN integrations Scrunch uses.

Peec AI

Peec AI suits marketing teams that want daily tracking with room for everyone, since every plan includes unlimited users. Starter is $95 monthly for 50 prompts on three models. Pro adds three countries.

OtterlyAI

OtterlyAI is the low-cost way in. Lite costs $29 monthly for 15 prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot. Step up to Standard at $189 and you get 100 prompts, API access and agent analytics on the same four engines.

Semrush

Semrush fits teams that want one subscription for SEO and AI visibility. Starter costs $199 monthly and tracks 50 prompts daily beside the keyword research, rank tracking and site audit tools Semrush is known for. Annual billing saves up to 17%.

Ahrefs Brand Radar

Ahrefs Brand Radar suits teams already inside Ahrefs. Custom prompt tracking, refreshed daily, starts at $50 monthly. For $199 monthly, its AI Visibility Index maps brand mentions across 519 million prompts with no setup and no prompts to write.

AthenaHQ

AthenaHQ bills in credits, and one credit buys one AI response. Essential is free. Starter costs $295 monthly for 3,600 credits across 11 models.

For a deeper look at each tool, see our comparison of 12 AI visibility tools. If Scrunch sits on a shortlist beside Profound or Peec, our guides to Profound alternatives and Peec AI alternatives cover those trade-offs.

Is Scrunch AI worth it, and who should skip it?

Scrunch is worth it when you have both the budget for Core or above and the people to act on what it finds. It fits four kinds of team best:

• Enterprise brands with content and web teams who'll work through its insights and page recommendations every week.
• Sitecore customers, because Sitecore says Scrunch now flags AI discoverability gaps inside Page Builder, while authors are still writing or editing the page.
• JavaScript-heavy sites, where AI bots struggle and Agent Pages can serve them clean HTML.
• Agencies running many clients, with multi-client workspaces, prospecting environments and up to 20% referral commission.

Security reviews should go smoothly. Scrunch says it has completed a SOC 2 Type II audit and supports SAML and OIDC single sign-on with role-based access control.

Skip it in three cases. If your budget sits below $250 monthly, a smaller tracker covers the basics. If you need Claude, Gemini or several countries without going to Enterprise, Core won't reach them. And if nobody on your team has time to act on the dashboard each week, you'll be paying good money to watch the gap.

Is Searchmaxxed right for you?

We're a strong fit if you lead marketing, growth or SEO at a law firm, clinic or premium builder that's slipping in search. Maybe your SEO team hasn't caught up. You want your company named when buyers ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google who to choose. And you want to see it in pipeline.

You talk to the people doing the work, with no account manager in between. We go after the searches and AI answers that bring buyers, then put your name on the pages those answers trust. The work spans technical SEO, content, schema, link building and digital PR, plus a place on the review sites and lists the engines lean on. We track which searches and AI answers turn into revenue, through your CRM as well as GA4. You own your site, content and data from day one.

One client came to us with a website that wasn't working. Three months later he was on page one for one of the most competitive searches in his industry. Now he has more high-intent leads than he can handle, and we're building the systems to handle them.

Across all our work:

Searchmaxxed's work has generated more than $15 million in revenue through search for its clients.

“I can't believe this worked.” That's what we hear. Clients tell us they finally found a growth partner in search that keeps its word and gets things done.

We're the wrong call in two cases. If you need leads this month just to survive, search takes longer than that. And if all you want is a dashboard of AI mentions for your own team, a tool like Scrunch is the better buy.

What should you do next?

Decide which outcome you're buying. If it's a scoreboard for a team that will act on it, start Scrunch's 7-day trial with your top 125 buyer questions ready to load. If it's being the answer, start here.

Get your free search analysis. We'll benchmark you against your top competitors across Google, ChatGPT and the other AI engines. We'll show you where they're named instead of you, and the few moves that will matter most.

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