Sitecore buys Scrunch for AI search visibility and brand control
Sitecore’s Scrunch deal turns AI answer visibility into a core platform feature, pushing brands to manage how machines describe them, not just how people click.
Sitecore has put AI search visibility at the center of its platform strategy with the acquisition of Scrunch on June 3, a deal Bloomberg valued at about $225 million. The move ties Scrunch’s Agent Experience Platform, or AXP, into SitecoreAI and signals a bigger shift in enterprise software: brand discovery is no longer just about ranking in search results, but about showing up clearly inside AI-generated answers.
Sitecore said the combined platform is meant to help organizations see where they appear in AI answers and fix what AI is missing or getting wrong. It also said the goal is to publish content across channels with brand integrity and message clarity, while improving traffic, conversion, and performance measurement. In other words, Sitecore is treating AI answer presence as something brands will manage alongside content management, personalization, and analytics, not as a separate SEO experiment on the side.
Eric Stine, Sitecore’s chief executive, said AI has changed buyer behavior forever and that “the internet must be written for machines to understand if humans are to experience it.” That framing goes to the heart of why the deal matters. Scrunch chief executive Chris Andrew said customers are increasingly trusting AI to define brands rather than the organizations behind those brands. Scrunch said it would continue operating as a standalone platform after the acquisition, even as its insights are folded into Sitecore’s broader experience stack.
The companies are also leaning hard on proof points meant to make AI visibility look measurable, not abstract. Scrunch says it is trusted by more than 500 companies and agencies, tracks 1.5 million prompts weekly and 6 million citations weekly, and can detect AI agents at the edge to serve AI-optimized content without disrupting the human experience. On its site, Scrunch highlights a 364% increase in brand presence for non-branded prompts and a 218% increase in citations from AXP-enabled pages. CMSWire also cited a Sitecore customer example in which Runpod tied a 400% increase in paying customers to AI search optimization efforts.
The acquisition fits Sitecore’s recent push to recast itself around AI. The company named Stine CEO effective May 1, 2025, and said XM Cloud had grown global revenues by 100% over the prior year. It launched SitecoreAI on November 4, 2025, positioning the platform around AI-driven discovery and the world beyond the website. With Gartner projecting that by 2026 more than one-third of web content would be created exclusively for AI and search engine consumption, Sitecore is betting that answer engine optimization has outgrown the SEO department and entered the enterprise core.
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