Sitecore Acquires Scrunch to Help Brands Influence Discovery and Buying Decisions in the AI-Search Era

Enables marketers to shape how their brand appears across AI-powered search by combining insights from “answer engines” with omnichannel content optimization

Ensures that customers experience personalized guidance from discovery to decision

Sitecore announced that it acquired Scrunch, an AI customer experience platform that helps brands understand and improve how they appear in AI search. The acquisition comes as large language models and AI generated answers dominate the digital landscape where buyers research solutions, compare options, and decide what deserves their attention and money. To compete, companies must continuously create, curate, and connect content that can be properly interpreted by these platforms.

AI systems influence brand perception: which offerings appear in answers, which competitors get mentioned, and which sources are cited. By the time buyers reach a brand – if they reach it at all – they have often already formed a point of view.

Brands need a scalable way to see where they appear in AI answers and to fix what AI is missing or getting wrong. Scrunch provides visibility into where brand messages are appearing, missing, or misrepresented in AI-driven discovery, working in concert with SitecoreAI to shape and manage content across AI ecosystems and other digital channels.

This transaction comes at a critical inflection point where brands must move from insight to action. It combines Scrunch’s insights, recommendation capabilities, and Agent Experience Platform (AXP) with Sitecore’s AI-powered digital experience platform (DXP). Together, Sitecore and Scrunch create a connected platform that publishes content across channels with brand integrity and message clarity, increasing traffic, improving conversion, and enabling organizations to measure performance. These capabilities help brands ensure that buyers find, trust, and choose them.

“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.”

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Driving Traffic, Delivering Outcomes
Customer adoption demonstrates the potential of Scrunch’s approach. In customer case studies and analyses, organizations using Scrunch have seen measurable improvements in AI search visibility, citations, and business outcomes.

With Scrunch, Akamai evaluated AXP-enabled webpages against comparable non-AXP webpages across tracked AI search prompts and models. The analysis found that AXP-enabled pages achieved a 364% increase in brand presence for non-branded prompts and a 218% increase in citations in AI-generated results.

In a separate study, Runpod used the Scrunch platform to expand prompt tracking and identify rendering and indexing issues that were limiting AI discoverability. Runpod reported a 400% increase in paying customers associated with its AI search optimization efforts.

“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.”

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Connecting AI Insights to Content, Engagement and Performance
The transaction addresses a growing enterprise need: helping brands understand how AI represents them and act on what needs to change. The issue is not simply more content. Most enterprises already have a lot of content, but it is often fragmented, outdated, or hard for AI systems to access and interpret. The opportunity is to make the right content clear, current, and contextualized for the machines that increasingly shape what buyers see before they ever reach a brand’s website. Scrunch provides visibility into buyer queries, brand representation, and competitive positioning, while SitecoreAI enables teams to manage and activate content across web, social, and other digital channels, helping organizations continuously improve performance and drive engagement.

Advancing AI-Driven Content Optimization
Standalone Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) platforms typically show which questions a brand wins or loses, where competitors appear, and which sources shape the answer. Scrunch goes further by:

• Moving beyond the website: Scrunch surfaces valuable knowledge across the broader content estate, not just publicly available web content.
• Delivering actionable recommendations for brands: Scrunch gives next-level visibility across the broad landscape of Large Language Models (LLMs) – ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, etc. – identifying the content, source, and delivery opportunities teams can act on to improve how their brand appears in AI answers. These recommendations will be automated within the SitecoreAI Content Management, Content Marketing, and Digital Asset Management solutions.
• Optimizing content for AI agents: Scrunch’s AXP delivers content formatted for LLMs in a way that AI agents can read and use, without disrupting the human experience.
• Driving execution: Unlike standalone tools, Scrunch connects directly to Sitecore workflows, enabling faster action and continuous improvement.