Scrunch AI Review 2026: Tracking, the Agent Experience Platform, and What Sitecore Changes
This is a review of Scrunch AI, the AI search visibility platform now owned by Sitecore, not the verb. It covers what the product does, the September 2026 pricing, the AXP layer that sets it apart, and the alternatives. Disclosure: Mavek builds a competing feature.
Scrunch AI is an AI search visibility platform that tracks how a brand appears in AI answers, four engines on its self-serve plan and nine on enterprise, and serves AI crawlers a machine-readable version of your site through its Agent Experience Platform, now an enterprise feature. Plans start at $250 a month as of a late-September 2026 repricing. Sitecore acquired the company in June 2026.
What Scrunch AI Is
Scrunch was founded in Salt Lake City in 2023 and led by CEO Chris Andrew. It set out to answer the same question as every tool in the answer engine optimization category, whether AI assistants recommend you, and then added a second product most trackers do not have: a way to change what the AI crawlers actually read. By mid-2026 it claimed more than 500 brands and agencies as customers. On June 3, 2026, Sitecore announced it had acquired Scrunch to fold that capability into its digital experience platform. The announcement did not disclose a price; Bloomberg reported roughly $225 million, unconfirmed by either side.
What It Does
The tracking half works the way you would expect. You load prompts (Scrunch also supplies an industry prompt library), assign buyer personas, and the platform runs them against the engines on your plan. Since the late-September 2026 repricing, the self-serve Core plan covers four: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot. Enterprise covers nine, adding Claude, Gemini, Meta AI, Google AI Mode and Grok. It reports presence, position, sentiment, share of answer against competitors, and the citations behind each answer. Page audits score individual URLs for how readable they are to a language model, and a GA4 integration attributes referral traffic from AI engines.
The half that matters more is the Agent Experience Platform, usually shortened to AXP. It sits at the CDN layer, identifies requests from verified AI bots, and serves them a parallel, structured version of the page built for machine reading. Human visitors see the normal site. The idea is that a large site with heavy JavaScript, thin headings, or scattered facts can be made legible to GPTBot and its peers without a redesign. Agent traffic attribution, which shows which crawlers fetched what, is included on every plan. AXP itself, though, sits in the enterprise tier only as of late September 2026.
Scrunch AI Pricing (September 2026)
Scrunch publishes its prices on scrunch.com, and repriced in late September 2026: the old Starter and Growth tiers are gone, replaced by one self-serve Core plan for brands, a separate Agency Core plan, and Enterprise. The figures below are what the pricing page showed on September 29, 2026 (screenshot underneath). Annual pricing exists; the page quotes monthly figures.
| Plan | Price | Includes | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Core | $250 / month | 125 prompts, 4 engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Copilot), 5 site audits a month, 1 brand workspace, 5 seats | One brand establishing an AI visibility baseline |
| Agency Core | $500 / month | 250 prompts, the same 4 engines, 3 brand workspaces plus 3 pitch workspaces, unlimited seats | Agencies reporting to a few clients |
| Enterprise | Custom | 9 engines, AXP, full site audits, API and MCP access, Looker Studio, SAML/OIDC SSO, dedicated account team | Large brands, especially Sitecore customers |
There is a 7-day free trial on the Core plans with instant signup and no credit card. Note that prompt budgets are shared across engines, and Core is thinner than the Starter plan it replaced: 125 prompts against 350, four engines against seven, one persona and one country.
Where Scrunch Is Strong
- AXP is a real differentiator. Most tools tell you AI cannot read your site. Scrunch gives you a way to fix that at the edge, with CDN integrations rather than a rebuild.
- The entry price fell after the acquisition. Repricing usually goes the other way; Core at $250 a month is $50 cheaper than the old Starter, and the 7-day no-card trial survived.
- Crawler analytics as standard. Agent traffic attribution is an enterprise-only feature at some competitors. Here it is in every tier.
- GA4 attribution. Tying AI referrals to sessions is the join most trackers leave to you.
- Published pricing and a real trial. No sales call for the Core plans.
Where It Falls Short
- Thinner at the bottom. $250 a month is the floor, and Core carries 125 prompts, four engines, one persona and one country, well under the old Starter's allowances. A founder testing whether AI visibility matters yet will still find Peec AI's $95 Starter far cheaper.
- AXP moved behind the sales door. The feature that sets Scrunch apart is enterprise-only as of late September 2026; the self-serve plans are tracking without the delivery layer.
- Tracking and delivery, not content. Scrunch does not write pages, run keyword research, publish to your CMS, or manage ads. The work AXP cannot fix still has to be done by someone.
- Post-acquisition roadmap. Sitecore bought Scrunch to strengthen its own platform. That is good news for Sitecore customers and an open question for everyone else. Ask what the standalone product looks like in twelve months before signing an annual deal.
- Export limits. The Enterprise Data API is enterprise-only; users on lower tiers have reported friction getting data out.
Who Should Buy It
Scrunch suits a mid-sized brand with a large or technically awkward website, an in-house marketing team, and a budget of a few hundred dollars a month for measurement. It suits Sitecore customers especially well now. It is a weaker fit for small teams without anyone to act on the findings. Agencies got their own plan in the September repricing: Agency Core at $500 a month covers three client workspaces plus three pitch workspaces with unlimited seats.
Scrunch AI Alternatives
Profound is the enterprise benchmark: deeper citation analytics, prompt volumes, up to nine engines, and custom pricing. See Mavek vs Profound for an honest read on where it wins.
Peec AI is the value tracker, from about $95 a month with unlimited seats. It has no AXP equivalent. Our Peec AI review covers it.
AirOps approaches the same goal from the content side, with workflows that produce and refresh pages at scale. Our AirOps review explains when that is the right shape.
Mavek, our own product, is an AI marketing platform rather than a tracker. It includes AI visibility tracking for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, and pairs it with SEO execution, content drafting and WordPress publishing, a rank tracker, Google and Meta ads, and a human team, from $125 a month. It has nothing like AXP, and its five engines are fewer than the nine on Scrunch Enterprise. It is the better choice when the missing piece is someone to do the work, not another dashboard. The full comparison is in our roundup of the best AI visibility tools.
Verdict
Scrunch AI is one of the more complete AI visibility products at its price, and AXP is a genuinely useful idea for large sites. The Sitecore deal makes it a safe bet for Sitecore shops and a wait-and-see for the rest. If your site is small and your team is smaller, spend the $250 on execution first.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Scrunch AI?
Scrunch AI is an AI search visibility platform. It tracks how a brand appears in answers from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews and Meta AI, and adds an Agent Experience Platform that serves AI crawlers a machine-readable version of your website. It was founded in Salt Lake City in 2023 and was acquired by Sitecore in June 2026.
How much does Scrunch AI cost?
Scrunch repriced in late September 2026. The pricing page now lists a single self-serve Core plan at $250 a month with 125 prompts, four engines, five seats and five site audits a month; Agency Core at $500 a month with 250 prompts, three brand workspaces, three pitch workspaces and unlimited seats; and a custom-priced Enterprise plan with nine engines, AXP, API access and SAML SSO. There is a 7-day free trial with no credit card. The earlier Starter ($300) and Growth ($500) tiers are gone.
Does Scrunch AI include AXP on the base plan?
No. As of late September 2026 the Agent Experience Platform is listed under Enterprise only. The Core plans cover tracking: prompts, citations, sentiment, site audits and bot-traffic analytics. If AXP is the reason you are shopping, budget for an enterprise conversation.
Who are Scrunch AI's competitors?
Profound is the enterprise leader in AI visibility analytics. Peec AI is the lower-cost tracker, starting at about $95 a month. AirOps competes on the content production side. Mavek is a partial alternative: an AI marketing platform with AI visibility tracking across five engines plus SEO, content and ads execution, from $125 a month.
Did Sitecore buy Scrunch?
Yes. Sitecore announced on June 3, 2026 that it had acquired Scrunch and would integrate the Agent Experience Platform into its digital experience platform. The price was not disclosed in the announcement; Bloomberg reported a figure of about $225 million, which neither company confirmed.
What is the Scrunch Agent Experience Platform?
The Agent Experience Platform (AXP) is Scrunch's delivery layer. It detects AI crawler traffic at the CDN and serves verified bots a parallel, structured version of each page that is easier for a language model to read, without changing what human visitors see. It is the feature that most distinguishes Scrunch from pure tracking tools.
Is Scrunch AI worth it?
For a mid-sized brand that wants tracking and a way to shape what AI crawlers read, without an enterprise sales cycle, it is one of the more complete options. The $300 entry price puts it above Peec AI, and the Sitecore acquisition raises a fair question about the roadmap for customers who do not use Sitecore.