Sitecore and Scrunch for AI Search Visibility

Sitecore announced this week that it has acquired Scrunch, an AI customer experience platform that helps brands understand and improve how they appear in AI-generated search results.

Any acquisition is a significant move. Naturally, the next question is: why was this acquisition made? This one makes a lot of sense when you look at the direction Sitecore has been heading over the past year.

What Scrunch Does

Before getting into the “why,” it’s worth understanding what Scrunch actually is.

Scrunch’s platform has four core capabilities: monitoring, auditing, optimization, and content delivery through its Agent Experience Platform (AXP). At a high level, Scrunch tells you where your brand appears when buyers ask AI platforms like ChatGPT or Perplexity questions about your product category. It shows you gaps, misrepresentations, and competitive blind spots in AI-generated answers.

So, what is an AXP? Here’s how it works: most websites are built to deliver an experience to humans on their devices. Things like JavaScript, styling, and navigation all make a site appealing and functional to a real person, but they can be unnecessary noise to an AI agent looking at your site. The AXP sits at the edge of your infrastructure and intercepts AI agent traffic. When it detects an AI crawler, it serves a structured, token-optimized version of the page instead of the full human-facing site. Actual visitors see nothing different. Google crawlers are not routed through the AXP, and your traditional SEO is unaffected.

The results Sitecore and Scrunch touted are remarkable. A case study published by Scrunch claims that Akamai implemented AXP on pages related to its Inference Cloud product and measured an 85% increase in total citations from AXP-enabled pages compared to non-AXP pages.

The Fit with Sitecore

If you’ve been following the Sitecore ecosystem, this acquisition fits squarely into Sitecore’s recent efforts over the past year: unify and streamline the existing products, go deeper on AI, and focus the platform. The big pivot was announced last year at Symposium, when Sitecore rebranded XM Cloud around an AI-first platform with Agentic Studio at the center.

The AI tools Sitecore has shipped so far, however, are fundamentally inward-facing. They help your team watch the world and react to it. They help you create and publish content faster. What they don’t do is tell you what happens to that content once it’s out there on the web.

Scrunch is meant to fill that gap. SitecoreAI helps you plan, generate, and publish content. Scrunch tells you whether that content is being picked up and represented accurately by AI platforms and gives you the tools to do something about it when it is not.

Acquiring Scrunch is another step in Sitecore’s effort to focus and optimize its product. AXP is an emerging and important practice, and Scrunch fills a gap in the platform. Scrunch’s AXP delivers content formatted for LLMs in a way that AI agents can read and use. It will connect directly to Sitecore workflows so teams can gather insight and act on it without jumping between platforms.

The Bigger Problem This Addresses

Everyone in this space knows SEO and has likely spent a lot of time on it. It is a known problem, although not always an easy one. Structure your content well, earn authoritative backlinks, keep your site performant, and Google’s crawlers will reward you with rankings. There is an entire subset of our industry built around it. It is an essential part of content strategy.

Agentic optimization is a new beast. It is similar to SEO, but the focus is on AI agents rather than search crawlers. Making sure your brand shows up accurately and favorably when AI platforms answer questions on behalf of buyers is a genuinely new and unsolved problem, and most organizations do not have a plan for it yet.

With traditional SEO, you optimize for a crawler that indexes your page and ranks it. With AI search, an LLM is synthesizing an answer from multiple sources and deciding in real time which brands to mention, which to leave out, and how to characterize them. Your site might rank well in Google but get overlooked entirely by an AI agent that cannot parse your content efficiently. Or worse, it might get misrepresented because the LLM pulled from a stale or ambiguous source, or because it got confused by your content.

There is no canonical “get your brand to rank in ChatGPT” guide yet. The signals are murkier, the feedback loops are slower, and the optimization levers are less obvious. Scrunch is built for this problem. It monitors where you appear across AI platforms, identifies gaps and misrepresentations, and, through AXP, helps you shape how AI agents retrieve your content.

What’s Next?

A few things I’m keeping an eye on as this integration rolls out:

How does AXP interact with SitecoreAI? The Signals feature already watches external trends and surfaces content recommendations. AXP monitors how your published content performs in AI search. Naturally, I’m wondering if we will be able to watch our own content. Can we, for example, configure Signals to give us reports on the things we just published to see how the AXP is grading them?

Packaging and pricing. Scrunch currently serves over 500 customers. Will Scrunch, or a more focused version of it, be incorporated into the base SitecoreAI license, like Personalize and Search have been?

Data and case studies. I’d love to see more information about how Scrunch has helped organizations optimize their content. Real data, real case studies, and real examples of best practices and gotchas.

“Publish and pray” is never a great strategy. We need to know how AI sees our content and have the ability to do something about it. This acquisition gives Sitecore a credible answer to both of those needs. The AXP technology is genuinely interesting, and AI content optimization is an obvious gap in strategy that needs to be addressed. Scrunch promises to not only provide those insights, but also make them actionable.

If your organization uses SitecoreAI, now is the time to start thinking about how your content appears in AI search and what you can do to improve it.