What Sitecore's Scrunch Acquisition Means for SitecoreAI Customers

For years, brands have focused on optimizing their websites for search engines, with success measured by rankings, clicks, and conversions. Today, however, customer discovery is evolving. Increasingly, buyers are turning to AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity to research products, compare solutions, and gather recommendations before ever visiting a website.

As a result, the traditional customer journey:

Search → Click → Research → Compare → Convert

is rapidly becoming:

Ask AI → Read Answer → Convert

This shift is changing how brands earn visibility online. It's no longer enough to rank highly in search results; organizations must also ensure their content is understood, cited, and recommended by AI-powered search and answer engines. This growing need has given rise to AI search optimization and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), strategies designed to improve how brands appear within AI-generated responses.

Sitecore's acquisition of Scrunch reflects this industry transformation. While the long-term roadmap is still evolving, the move signals that AI visibility, AI discovery, and GEO are becoming increasingly important components of the broader SitecoreAI vision. As AI-driven discovery continues to reshape customer behavior, organizations will need new ways to monitor, measure, and improve their presence across emerging AI platforms.

What is Scrunch AI and why did Sitecore acquire It

As organizations invest more heavily in AI-driven customer experiences, a new challenge is emerging: understanding how AI systems discover, interpret, and recommend content. Scrunch AI addresses this challenge by helping brands measure and improve their visibility across leading AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity. Much like SEO tools help marketers understand search performance, Scrunch provides insights into brand mentions, citations, competitive visibility, and opportunities to improve AI discoverability.

For Sitecore, the acquisition aligns closely with the broader SitecoreAI vision of helping brands optimize digital experiences for an AI-first world. As customer journeys increasingly begin with AI-powered search and recommendations, visibility within these platforms is becoming just as important as traditional search visibility. Scrunch brings two key capabilities to support this shift: AI Monitoring & Visibility and the Agent Experience Platform (AXP).

AI monitoring & visibility

Scrunch provides organizations with visibility into how their brand appears across leading AI platforms. The platform helps marketers:

• Monitor prompts and topics relevant to their business
• Track brand mentions, citations, and competitive share-of-voice
• Measure sentiment and positioning in AI-generated answers
• Understand which sources AI systems rely upon
• Identify opportunities to improve AI discoverability

Just as SEO platforms transformed how marketers optimize for search engines, AI visibility platforms like Scrunch are helping organizations adapt to the growing importance of AI search optimization.

Agent Experience Platform (AXP)

The most differentiated capability within Scrunch is its Agent Experience Platform (AXP).

Modern websites are built for humans and often contain large amounts of JavaScript, styling, tracking code, and other presentation-layer content that provides little value to AI systems. In many cases, AI crawlers and retrieval bots only consume a small percentage of what is actually rendered to human visitors.

AXP addresses this challenge by detecting AI agents and serving them a dedicated AI-optimized version of the page while leaving the human experience completely unchanged. This capability aligns closely with the goals of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and AI search optimization, which focus on improving visibility within AI-generated responses.

The platform:

• Detects AI crawlers, retrieval bots, and AI browser agents
• Creates structured, AI-friendly HTML representations of content
• Removes unnecessary presentation and script layers
• Enriches content with AI-consumable structure and context
• Delivers optimized content through the CDN without impacting the human experience

In simple terms, AXP "scrunches" a page into a much smaller, cleaner, and more efficient version that is easier for AI systems to understand, process, and cite.

Early results

One of the most compelling early examples comes from Akamai. By implementing Scrunch's AXP technology, Akamai reported:

• 364% increase in citations for non-branded prompts
• 218% increase in overall AI citations

These results suggest that making content easier for AI systems to consume can have a measurable impact on how often brands are referenced in AI-generated answers.

As AI becomes a primary discovery channel, organizations will need to think beyond traditional SEO and invest in AI search optimization and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) strategies, making content easier for AI systems to understand.

What does the Scrunch acquisition mean for Sitecore customers

The acquisition of Scrunch is another signal that AI visibility is becoming a strategic priority. Organizations should begin evaluating:

• How their brand currently appears in AI-generated answers
• Whether key content is easily consumable by AI systems
• Opportunities to improve citations and AI discoverability
• How GEO and SEO can work together as part of a unified search strategy

At Altudo, we've been helping organizations improve discoverability through technical SEO, content strategy, structured data, GEO, and AI readiness assessments long before the emergence of dedicated AI optimization platforms.

We can help you evaluate your current AI visibility, establish a measurement framework, identify optimization opportunities, and determine whether Scrunch and AXP are the right fit for your organization.

Schedule a 1:1 consultation call and take an AI Visibility Assessment and learn how your brand can compete in the emerging AI-first discovery landscape.