Scrunch AI

Definition of Scrunch AI

Scrunch AI is a comprehensive AI brand monitoring and optimization platform founded in 2023 that helps enterprises track, analyze, and improve how their brands appear in AI-generated search results across major language models. The platform monitors brand presence, citations, and positioning across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude, Gemini, and other LLM-based search engines. Scrunch AI provides real-time visibility into how AI agents and crawlers interact with brand content, delivers actionable insights for improving visibility, and offers the Agent Experience Platform (AXP) to automatically optimize websites for AI consumption. Trusted by over 500 companies including Lenovo, SKIMS, BairesDev, and Penn State University, Scrunch AI has become a critical tool for enterprises navigating the shift from traditional search to AI-first customer journeys. The platform launched publicly in March 2025 after an 18-month beta period and has raised $19 million in venture funding to support its mission of helping brands win in the era of AI search.

The Evolution of Brand Monitoring in the AI Era

The emergence of Scrunch AI reflects a fundamental shift in how brands must approach visibility and customer discovery. For decades, traditional brand monitoring focused on tracking media mentions, social media conversations, and search engine rankings—metrics that measured human-driven discovery. However, the rapid adoption of large language models and AI-powered search interfaces has created an entirely new discovery channel that operates on different principles. According to McKinsey research, 50% of consumers now use AI-powered search, and this trend is expected to impact $750 billion in revenue by 2028. This seismic shift means that brands can no longer rely solely on traditional SEO and PR monitoring; they must now understand how AI systems interpret, rank, and present their brand to potential customers. Scrunch AI emerged to address this gap, providing the first comprehensive platform designed specifically for AI search visibility monitoring and optimization. The platform’s founders, Chris Andrew (former Chief Product Officer at Hearsay Systems) and Robert MacCloy (former CTO at Hearsay), recognized that the customer journey was fundamentally changing—from browsing websites to searching Google to now asking AI chatbots for answers. This insight led them to build a platform that helps enterprises understand and optimize their presence in this new AI-driven discovery landscape.

How Scrunch AI’s Monitoring & Insights Platform Works

The core of Scrunch AI’s value proposition lies in its Monitoring & Insights module, which provides real-time visibility into brand performance across AI search engines. The platform operates by continuously running thousands of industry-specific and custom prompts across multiple AI engines, capturing how brands appear in the generated responses. For each prompt, Scrunch AI tracks brand mentions, citation frequency, competitive positioning, and sentiment. The platform’s dashboard reveals critical metrics including how your brand ranks compared to competitors for specific queries, which pages are being cited by AI engines, and how your visibility trends over time. One of the most powerful features is citation tracking, which shows exactly which domains and URLs are being referenced in AI responses—allowing brands to understand which content is most valuable to AI systems. The Insights module goes deeper by identifying optimization opportunities, detecting technical errors that prevent AI crawlers from accessing content, and providing content recommendations to improve visibility. Scrunch AI’s data updates every three days, providing near-real-time visibility into how AI engines perceive and present your brand. The platform also includes AI bot traffic monitoring through Google Analytics integration, allowing brands to see exactly how AI crawlers interact with their websites and which pages receive the most AI bot attention.

Comparison of AI Brand Monitoring Platforms

The Agent Experience Platform (AXP): Rewriting the Web for AI

One of Scrunch AI’s most innovative features is the Agent Experience Platform (AXP), which represents a paradigm shift in how brands should approach AI optimization. Rather than simply monitoring how AI engines perceive your content, AXP automatically creates a parallel, AI-optimized version of your website that is served invisibly to AI agents and crawlers. The platform works through three core mechanisms: Intercept (detecting when AI traffic visits your site), Translate (converting your existing website into machine-readable, AI-optimized format), and Serve (delivering the optimized version to AI agents without affecting human users). This approach is revolutionary because AI agents don’t “browse” websites the way humans do—they don’t care about visual design, animations, or user experience elements. Instead, they extract structured data, parse content hierarchies, and prioritize semantic clarity. By automatically restructuring your website’s content for AI consumption, AXP enables brands to improve their visibility in AI responses without requiring technical expertise or modifying their human-facing website. The platform integrates with major CDN providers including Akamai, Cloudflare, and Vercel, allowing for seamless deployment at scale. According to Scrunch AI customer testimonials, brands implementing AXP have reported 9x increases in sign-ups from AI search and 4x improvements in overall AI visibility. This feature addresses a critical gap in the market: while traditional SEO optimization focuses on human-readable content, AXP optimizes for the machine-readable web that AI systems actually consume.

Real-World Impact and Customer Results

The effectiveness of Scrunch AI’s platform is demonstrated through measurable customer results across diverse industries. Clerk, a developer authentication platform, reported a 9x increase in sign-ups from AI search after implementing Scrunch AI’s monitoring and optimization recommendations. RunPod, a GPU computing platform, achieved 4x growth in their acquisition strategy by turning AI search into a core part of their customer acquisition funnel using Scrunch AI’s insights. SKIMS, the fashion and intimates brand, identified AI search as one of their fastest-growing channels and uses Scrunch AI to shape how customers discover and engage with their brand. These results underscore a critical business reality: AI search is no longer a peripheral channel—it’s becoming a primary driver of customer discovery and revenue. The platform’s ability to identify which content is being cited by AI engines, detect technical issues preventing AI crawlers from accessing pages, and provide specific optimization recommendations has proven invaluable for enterprises. One particularly compelling case study involved a brand that discovered AI engines were citing outdated pricing information from an old section of their website. By identifying this issue through Scrunch AI and updating the source, the brand recovered AI inclusion within 10 days and saw AI-driven sessions rise by 38%. These examples demonstrate that Scrunch AI doesn’t just provide monitoring data—it enables actionable optimization that directly impacts business outcomes.

Key Features and Capabilities

• Multi-Engine Monitoring: Track brand presence across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude, Gemini, Meta AI, and emerging LLM platforms simultaneously
• Citation Analytics: Identify which domains and URLs are being cited in AI responses, understand citation consistency, and measure influence scores
• Competitive Benchmarking: Compare your brand’s visibility, positioning, and sentiment against competitors across all tracked AI engines
• Prompt Analytics: Monitor performance across thousands of industry-specific and custom prompts, with filtering by topic, persona, region, and model
• AI Bot Traffic Monitoring: Integrate with Google Analytics to see how AI crawlers interact with your website and identify pages receiving the most AI bot attention
• Automatic Error Detection: Identify technical issues preventing AI agents from crawling and indexing your content, with specific recommendations for fixes
• Agent Experience Platform (AXP): Automatically create and serve an AI-optimized version of your website to AI agents without affecting human users
• Real-Time Insights: Receive actionable recommendations for improving visibility, expanding content, and optimizing for AI search
• Enterprise-Grade Security: SOC 2 Type II compliance, role-based access control, multi-brand management, and dedicated Data API for enterprise customers
• Agency Support: Dedicated agency plans with pitch environments, partner programs, and agency-focused training for marketing agencies

The Business Case for AI Brand Monitoring

The shift toward AI-powered discovery has created an urgent business imperative for brands to monitor and optimize their AI visibility. Research from Riff Analytics analyzing over 1.2 million AI-generated answers reveals that AI search share of discovery has grown from 8% in 2023 to 42% in 2025—a 425% increase in just two years. Similarly, product research conducted in AI engines has grown from 11% to 36%, while average brand mentions in AI answers have surged from 5 to 74 per week—a staggering 1,380% increase. Despite this explosive growth, only 24% of brands are actively monitoring their AI visibility, creating a significant competitive advantage for early adopters. The business impact is substantial: brands that optimize for AI visibility report measurable increases in qualified traffic, improved conversion rates, and higher customer acquisition efficiency. Unlike traditional SEO, where ranking improvements take months to compound, AI visibility improvements can drive results within weeks. This is because AI engines update their training data and responses continuously, and brands that quickly identify and fix issues can see immediate improvements in how they’re presented to potential customers. Furthermore, AI search operates on fundamentally different ranking factors than traditional search—structured data carries 90% importance (versus 30% in traditional SEO), brand sentiment carries 85% weight, and topical consistency across all digital properties is critical. This means that brands optimizing for traditional SEO alone are missing the opportunity to dominate in AI search, where the competitive landscape is still relatively nascent and first-movers can establish significant advantages.

Integration with Enterprise Systems and Workflows

Scrunch AI is designed for enterprise-scale deployment with robust integration capabilities and security features. The platform offers a dedicated Data API that allows enterprises to plug Scrunch AI data directly into internal dashboards, business intelligence systems, and AI workflows. This integration capability is critical for large organizations that need to incorporate AI visibility metrics into existing reporting infrastructure and decision-making processes. The platform supports role-based access control (RBAC), enabling different team members to access only the data and features relevant to their roles—from executives reviewing high-level visibility trends to content teams implementing specific optimization recommendations. Scrunch AI also supports multi-brand, multi-region, and multi-language deployments, making it ideal for global enterprises managing complex brand portfolios. The platform’s SOC 2 Type II compliance ensures that enterprise data is handled with the highest security standards, and the company has successfully completed independent security audits. For agencies, Scrunch AI offers specialized agency plans that include pitch environments for demonstrating capabilities to prospective clients, partner programs with referral rewards, and agency-focused training to help teams master the platform. This comprehensive enterprise support reflects Scrunch AI’s positioning as a mission-critical tool for organizations serious about competing in the AI-first customer journey.

The Future of AI Brand Monitoring and Optimization

As AI search continues to mature and evolve, the importance of AI brand monitoring platforms like Scrunch AI will only increase. The long-term vision articulated by Scrunch AI’s founders involves creating two parallel versions of the internet—one optimized for human engagement and interaction, and another optimized for AI agents that autonomously navigate, reason, and act on behalf of users. In this future, brands will need to maintain consistent, accurate, and optimized presence across both versions of the internet. Emerging trends suggest that AI agents will become increasingly autonomous, with the ability to transact, make purchasing decisions, and interact with brands on behalf of users. This means that AI brand monitoring will evolve beyond visibility tracking to include monitoring of agent behavior, transaction accuracy, and brand representation in autonomous agent interactions. Additionally, as more specialized AI engines emerge (beyond ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI), brands will need monitoring platforms that can scale to track presence across dozens of different AI systems. The competitive landscape is also evolving rapidly—Scrunch AI has raised $19 million in funding (including a $15 million Series A in July 2025), while competitors like Profound have raised $58.5 million, indicating significant investor confidence in the AI brand monitoring category. This capital influx will drive rapid feature development, improved data quality, and expanded platform capabilities. Looking ahead, AI brand monitoring will become as essential to marketing strategy as SEO monitoring is today—but with even greater business impact, since AI search is expected to capture a larger share of customer discovery than traditional search ever did.

Conclusion: Navigating the AI-First Customer Journey

Scrunch AI represents a critical evolution in brand monitoring technology, addressing the fundamental shift from human-driven to AI-driven customer discovery. As 50% of consumers now use AI-powered search and this percentage continues to grow, brands that fail to monitor and optimize their AI visibility risk becoming invisible to potential customers. The platform’s comprehensive monitoring capabilities, innovative Agent Experience Platform, and proven customer results demonstrate that AI brand monitoring is no longer optional—it’s essential. Whether you’re a startup looking to establish presence in AI search or an enterprise managing complex brand portfolios across multiple regions and languages, Scrunch AI provides the visibility, insights, and optimization tools needed to compete effectively in the AI-first era. The convergence of real-time monitoring, actionable insights, and automated optimization makes Scrunch AI a powerful tool for brands committed to winning in AI search. As the market continues to evolve and AI agents become increasingly autonomous, platforms like Scrunch AI will become even more critical for ensuring that brands maintain accurate, optimized, and competitive presence across the AI-powered web.