Sitecore acquires Scrunch to manage brand visibility in AI search

Sitecore’s acquisition of Scrunch is a clean signal that AI-search visibility is moving from experiment to product category. The company said on June 3, 2026 that it bought the AI customer experience platform to help brands understand where they show up, disappear, or get misrepresented inside AI-generated answers, then use that visibility to shape discovery before buyers ever reach a website. The deal, valued at about $225 million, puts a real price tag on a problem that many marketers had been treating as an SEO side project.

Scrunch was founded in 2023 by Chris Andrew and Robert MacCloy and says it has raised $26 million from Mayfield, Decibel, Homebrew, GTM Capital and individual angels including TJ Parker, Bryant Chou, Steve Garrity and Clara Shih. The product itself did not spend long in stealth: Scrunch launched in November 2024 and had signed 25 customers by March 2025. That pace matters because it shows the market for monitoring and improving brand presence in AI search formed fast enough to attract a serious enterprise buyer.

Sitecore is not buying Scrunch as a science project. The company said the technology will work with SitecoreAI and its broader digital experience platform, combining answer-engine insights with omnichannel content optimization. The pitch is blunt: give marketers a scalable way to see where their brand appears in AI answers, where it is missing and where the machines are getting it wrong, then use that information to publish content with stronger brand integrity, better message clarity, more traffic and better conversion. Sitecore also said it surpassed $500 million in annual recurring revenue in fiscal 2024, which explains how it can make a purchase of this size while pushing deeper into AI-enabled software.

For agencies, the takeaway is sharper than a generic “SEO is changing” story. Enterprise platforms are starting to absorb the visibility layer that specialist shops have begun to service manually, especially the work around AI-search audits, brand-mention tracking and answer-engine optimization retainers. That does not erase agency opportunity. It shifts the value up the stack, toward strategy, content governance, implementation and ongoing measurement tied to business outcomes, not just rankings. Scrunch’s own positioning around monitoring brand presence in AI search and optimizing websites for AI agents makes the direction obvious: the next premium service line is managing both human-facing and machine-facing discovery at the same time.