Sitecore, a company that makes digital experience software used by brands to create, manage and personalise content across websites, apps and social channels, has acquired Scrunch, a platform that measures and improves how brands appear in AI-driven search. The acquisition addresses a change in how buyers research products, as large language models and AI-generated answers increasingly shape which options people see before they reach a company's website.
The problem Scrunch targets is visibility. When an AI system answers a query, it decides which brands appear, which competitors get mentioned and which sources it cites. By the time a buyer reaches a brand directly, they have often already formed an opinion based on those answers. Scrunch gives companies a view of where their messages appear, are missing or are misrepresented across AI systems, covering models including ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Perplexity.
What distinguishes Scrunch from standalone answer engine optimisation tools, which typically show which questions a brand wins or loses and where competitors appear, is its connection to execution. The platform surfaces content across a company's broader content estate rather than only publicly available web pages, and it produces recommendations that teams can act on to improve how their brand appears in AI answers. Through Scrunch's Agent Experience Platform (AXP), content is delivered in a format that AI agents can read and use without changing the experience for human visitors. Once integrated, those recommendations will be automated within Sitecore's content management, content marketing and digital asset management tools, connecting the insight directly to the workflows where content is produced.
The company pointed to customer results to illustrate the approach. Akamai, a cloud and cybersecurity company, compared AXP-enabled webpages against comparable pages without AXP across tracked AI search prompts and models, and reported a 364% increase in brand presence for non-branded prompts and a 218% increase in citations in AI-generated results. In a separate case, Runpod, a cloud computing provider for AI workloads, used Scrunch to identify rendering and indexing issues limiting its discoverability and reported a 400% increase in paying customers associated with its AI search optimisation work.
"AI has changed buyer behavior forever. We're at a pivotal moment where companies must rethink traditional digital strategies and accept that the internet must be written for machines to understand if we want humans to experience it," said Eric Stine, Chief Executive Officer of Sitecore. "With Scrunch, we enable our customers to understand how they are represented in AI-generated answers and automatically act on those insights, maximizing how they reach, engage, and serve their customers. We're helping brands show up with greater clarity, authority, and relevance so they can build trust, increase share of voice, and influence decisions early in the buying journey when it matters most."
"Control of the brand narrative is shifting, and customers are increasingly trusting AI to define brands, rather than the organizations behind those brands," said Chris Andrew, Chief Executive Officer of Scrunch, a Sitecore company. "By joining forces, we're helping companies meet buyers where they are, moving beyond traditional SEO to win inside AI-generated answers. That's where Scrunch's AXP is a critical advantage, delivering content in a format AI agents can read and use, without disrupting the human experience, allowing brands to become the trusted sources that power those answers."
"At Perficient, we're building an AI-first marketing engine focused on speed, relevance, and real impact," said Carrie Grapenthin, Chief Marketing Officer of Perficient. "As a customer and partner of both Sitecore and Scrunch, this combination is an exciting opportunity for our team. Insight without action isn't enough. Scrunch helps us see where our brand is showing up, where gaps exist, and what needs to improve. Sitecore helps us act on those insights across the content and experiences we already manage, so we can move faster and deliver differentiated content in our unique brand voice."
