Scrunch AI Review 2026: The Sitecore Acquisition, Pricing and Alternatives

Updated 7 October 2026 after Sitecore's acquisition of Scrunch. Generate More is a Helsinki-based AEO and AI SEO agency for Nordic and international B2B software companies, founded in 2024 by Lari Numminen. I test AI search tools hands-on for client work, and my test of Scrunch dates from October 2025.

What is Scrunch AI?

Scrunch AI is an AI search visibility platform owned by Sitecore. It tracks how ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews and Meta AI describe a brand, and its Agent Experience Platform (AXP) serves AI agents a simplified, machine-readable version of a company's website while human visitors see the normal site. Sitecore announced the acquisition on 3 June 2026, and Bloomberg reported the price at $225 million (also covered by B&T). Neither company disclosed the terms.

Scrunch AI homepage, October 2026

Chris Andrew (CEO) and Robert MacCloy (CTO) founded Scrunch in 2023. According to Scrunch's own company page, it raised $26 million before the deal, including a $4 million seed round led by Mayfield and a $15 million Series A led by Decibel. The Scrunch homepage shows Lenovo, Skims, Crunchbase and Penn State as customers, and Sitecore's announcement puts the base at more than 500 brands and agencies.

Scrunch AI at a glance (October 2026)

Why did Sitecore buy Scrunch?

Sitecore bought Scrunch to connect two steps that used to live in separate tools: seeing where a brand is missing from AI answers, and changing the content that causes the gap. In the acquisition announcement, Sitecore says Scrunch's recommendations "will be automated within the SitecoreAI Content Management, Content Marketing, and Digital Asset Management solutions." CEO Eric Stine described the goal as letting customers "understand how they are represented in AI-generated answers and automatically act on those insights."

The fit is easy to see from the product side. Sitecore manages websites for people, and Scrunch had built a way to measure AI answers and a separate delivery layer for AI agents. Matt Thompson of Sitecore partner Americaneagle put it this way in their write-up of the deal: "What Scrunch offered is a CMS for agents. What Sitecore has is a CMS for humans. You really need both."

Scrunch's CEO Chris Andrew told CMSWire that the acquisition "accelerates Scrunch's product roadmap rather than redirecting it."

What is Scrunch AXP, and has it launched?

AXP is live. Scrunch's help centre documentation, dated 7 July 2026, says it "is live and serving LLM-optimized content for multiple large enterprises." When I tested Scrunch in October 2025, AXP was the most interesting thing on the roadmap and still in limited testing.

The mechanism sits at the CDN, in front of the website. AXP maps a company's key pages, rewrites them for language models, detects AI agents when they request a page, and returns the simplified HTML at the same URL, leaving the design people see untouched. Scrunch supports three CDNs: Cloudflare through Cloudflare Snippets, Akamai through EdgeWorkers and the Forward Rewrite cloudlet, and AWS CloudFront through CloudFront Functions. Deployment is managed by Scrunch, so the customer's engineers do not rebuild anything. Scrunch's July 2026 product post describes the output as "token-light, JavaScript-free HTML" with analytics scripts, tracking pixels and layout shells removed.

Search engines are handled separately. Scrunch states that AXP "only serves differentiated content to LLM bots, not traditional search indexers like Googlebot," which is how it separates the approach from cloaking. That is the vendor's position, and anyone deploying it on a site with meaningful Google traffic should confirm the bot rules with their own SEO team.

The published results come from Scrunch and Sitecore. Akamai saw a 364% increase in how often it appeared in AI-generated answers on AXP-enabled pages, according to the acquisition announcement, and Runpod reported a 400% increase in paying customers, according to CMSWire.

Buyers should check packaging before assuming AXP comes with a plan. The same help article says "AXP and Monitoring & Insights are separate products," and the pricing page does not say which plans include AXP. In the July post, Scrunch also describes AXP as "the product itself" going forward, so the monitoring tool most customers signed up for is no longer the centre of the company.

What does Scrunch do inside SitecoreAI?

The first integration shipped on 16 September 2026 as an early access feature in SitecoreAI's Page builder. The Sitecore changelog describes AI discoverability scores for citeability and retrievability, with suggested edits that authors apply directly in the page canvas. Accepting a suggestion creates a new content version and goes through the existing approval workflow. It is "available to any organization with a Scrunch subscription", which in practice means a Sitecore customer who also pays for Scrunch.

Scrunch followed on 1 October with a post on the SitecoreAI integration covering Signals (alerts when AI search data changes), in-CMS recommendations from Site Optimization, always-on AI content review and week-over-week re-scoring. The same post states that "Scrunch is a standalone platform," available whatever stack a company runs.

How much does Scrunch AI cost in 2026?

Scrunch publishes three plans on its pricing page. Annual billing saves 17%, and the Starter plan has a 7-day free trial without a credit card.

Enterprise adds SAML/OIDC single sign-on, the Enterprise Data API and a dedicated go-to-market team. The entry price is the same as when I tested the product in 2025 ($250 a month for 350 prompts on annual billing), and API access is still reserved for Enterprise.

Who is Scrunch AI for after the Sitecore acquisition?

Sitecore sells to large, complex organisations, and Scrunch's newest features are built for them. EQT, which has owned Sitecore since 2016, says Sitecore has served more than 5,200 brands. A typical example is VELUX, which runs more than 190 websites across 38 countries on Sitecore and moved over 140,000 digital assets into its DAM. Sitecore publishes no prices, offers no free tier or self-serve plan, and sells through sales teams and system integrators whose implementation work often costs more than the licence, according to UsagePricing's analysis. The same analysis places Sitecore's core market in mid-market and enterprise companies that are multi-brand, multi-region or regulated.

Scrunch now makes most sense for three groups. Sitecore customers on SitecoreAI get the Page builder integration, which no other CMS has. Enterprises already running Akamai, Cloudflare or AWS CloudFront can use AXP to give AI agents cleaner pages without a website rebuild. Agencies and system integrators with Sitecore clients get a measurement tool that now sits inside their clients' content workflow.

B2B SaaS and scale-up teams that bought Scrunch for prompt monitoring at $250 a month are in a different position. The monitoring product still works, and the self-serve plans are still on sale. Every feature Scrunch has shipped since June points at SitecoreAI and AXP. If that describes your team, review your options before the next renewal.

What I found when I tested Scrunch in October 2025

I tested Scrunch for a real SaaS and B2B tech company on the $250/month plan with 350 prompts, as part of testing all the major AI search visibility platforms. The monitoring product I used then is still the core of the standalone Scrunch tool.

Setup was fast. Onboarding suggested prompts, competitors and a brand kit, and I could organise prompts by topic, persona, buyer journey stage and region, then filter dashboards by model and custom tags. Each prompt could run on a chosen set of AI engines. Data refreshed every three days, prompts younger than 14 days refreshed daily, and an instant collection could be triggered on demand. A site audit checked how readable pages were for AI crawlers, and the GA4 integration showed referral traffic from AI platforms.

Core Scrunch AI monitoring view at the time of testing

The monitoring covered brand mentions, position in answers, sentiment, share of voice against named competitors, topic coverage and cited sources split into brand-owned, competitor and third-party pages. Filtering was the strongest part of the product. It took seconds to find the prompts where we had no citation, or where a competitor was cited in our place.

Three gaps stood out at the time. The Insights section was still in beta and gave little guidance on what to change. Competitor analysis showed who appeared, with few signals about why. There was no content editor, so acting on the data meant switching tools. Scrunch's public documentation also did not say whether results came from model APIs or live consumer interfaces. The Site Optimization recommendations now shipping inside SitecoreAI are aimed at the first and third of those gaps, for Sitecore customers.

Scrunch AI filtering and prompt organisation at the time of testing

Best Scrunch AI alternatives in 2026

For a Scrunch customer outside Sitecore, the right replacement is the tool that covers what the team actually used Scrunch for, which in most cases is prompt-level monitoring across several AI engines. I have tested each of the tools below myself, and I checked every price on the vendors' own pricing pages on 7 October 2026.

Promptwatch

Promptwatch is the closest replacement for a team that wants monitoring and the next step in one tool. The $95 Essential plan includes 50 prompts, 6,000 responses, 500 agent credits a month and MCP and API access, which Scrunch reserves for Enterprise. Larger plans run $245 for 150 prompts and $579 for 350 prompts.

Peec AI

Fifty prompts, three models of your choice, daily tracking and unlimited users make up Peec AI's Starter plan, which suits agencies and marketing teams that want many people looking at the same data. Its model list includes ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini and Naver AI, and annual billing is 15% cheaper. Peec's pricing page loads its prices dynamically, so check the current figure there.

Otterly AI

Budget is the reason to pick Otterly. The Lite plan costs $29 a month ($25 billed annually) for 15 prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot, and the $189 Standard plan raises that to 100 prompts with API and MCP access. Claude, Google AI Mode and Gemini are paid add-ons.

Superlines

Superlines is a European option priced in euros, with an MCP server already on the €79 Starter plan (50 prompts, any three answer engines, unlimited competitors). Pro costs €199 for 150 prompts and Growth €379 for 300, with 12% off for annual billing.

Writesonic

Writesonic is the alternative I recommend most often, because it pairs daily tracking with an Action Center that turns gaps into on-page and off-page tasks. The $79 Starter plan tracks 50 prompts daily across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, Basic costs $199 for 100 prompts and Growth $399 for 200 prompts with sentiment analysis and a trial of the Action Center. The full Action Center and all eight engines, including Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Mode, sit on the custom Enterprise plan.

Profound

Profound is the pick for a large organisation that wants enterprise depth without tying AI search to one content platform. Pricing is custom after a 7-day free trial of 50 prompts, and the Enterprise plan covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Claude, Google AI Overviews and Exa Search. In my experience it fits scale-ups managing AI visibility across many audiences and segments. Small teams can build much of the same reporting themselves at lower cost.

My conclusion: Scrunch is becoming Sitecore's AI search layer

Scrunch is now best understood as the AI search component of SitecoreAI. The acquisition, the July decision to make AXP the core product and the September Page builder integration all point the same way.

My expectation is that AXP ends up as a SitecoreAI feature and that Scrunch gets less marketing as an independent tool over time. Scrunch's own position, as of October, is that it remains standalone "whatever your stack", and it still sells self-serve plans with a free trial. Treat my view as a forecast based on where the product work has gone since June.

For Sitecore customers and large enterprises that want AI agents to read their sites more reliably, Scrunch is a strong option and AXP is the reason to look at it. For B2B SaaS and scale-up teams that mainly need to track how AI engines describe them, the tools in the alternatives table cover that job, most of them at a lower entry price.

Frequently asked questions about Scrunch AI

Who owns Scrunch AI?

Sitecore owns Scrunch. The acquisition was announced on 3 June 2026, and Scrunch now calls itself "a Sitecore Company".

How much did Sitecore pay for Scrunch?

Bloomberg reported $225 million. Sitecore and Scrunch did not disclose the terms.

Can you still buy Scrunch without Sitecore?

Yes, as of October 2026. Scrunch sells Starter and Growth plans directly on its pricing page and describes itself as a standalone platform. The SitecoreAI Page builder features require both SitecoreAI and a Scrunch subscription.

How much does Scrunch AI cost?

Starter costs $250 a month billed annually or $300 month-to-month for 350 custom prompts, Growth costs $417 or $500 for 700 prompts, and Enterprise is custom. There is a 7-day free trial.

What is Scrunch AXP?

AXP (Agent Experience Platform) runs at the CDN layer on Cloudflare, Akamai or AWS CloudFront, detects AI agents and serves them simplified, JavaScript-free versions of a site's pages at the same URLs. According to Scrunch, it does not change what people or Googlebot see.

Does Scrunch give prompt recommendations?

Yes. In my 2025 test, onboarding suggested prompts and competitors, and the current plans include a library of industry prompts (1,000 on Starter, 2,500 on Growth) alongside your own custom prompts.