Scrunch Review 2026: Pricing, and the Sitecore Acquisition

Scrunch is an AI search visibility platform that tracks how a brand appears inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, and it is now owned by Sitecore. That last part is the most important thing about it in 2026, and most reviews still ranking for this query do not mention it.

Two facts change the buying decision, and both are recent:

• Sitecore acquired Scrunch on 3 June 2026, in a deal reported at around $225 million.
• Its pricing is now public, at $250 a month, where it used to be quote-only.

Disclosure: EchoWi competes with Scrunch. Prices were read from Scrunch’s own pricing page on 5 August 2026.

The short version

1. Scrunch is the enterprise end of this market. Entry is $250 a month against $20 for the cheapest credible alternative, and the plan shapes assume a team, not a founder.
2. It is no longer independent. Being inside Sitecore is good news if you run Sitecore and a strategic question if you do not.
3. Pricing became public after the acquisition, which is unusual and useful: you can compare it without a sales call.
4. The domain moved. scrunch.ai no longer resolves. Older reviews linking to it are pointing at nothing, which is a fair signal of how recently they were checked.
5. Buy it for procurement and scale, not for measurement quality. Nobody has published a controlled accuracy comparison of these tools, including us.

What it costs, verified

Read on 11 August 2026, and this is a different page from the one we read on the 7th. There are now two tiers, not three.

Core covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot. Enterprise adds Claude, Gemini, Meta AI, Google AI Mode and Grok.

Read the engine list, not the price. The four days between our two readings moved the entry price down by $50 and moved five engines out of reach of anyone not on a custom contract. Four days earlier, every paid tier carried all seven engines the product then supported, which we verified against this same page.

And read the prompt allowance next. 125 unique prompts is the Core allowance, against 350 custom plus 1,000 industry prompts on the withdrawn Starter tier. One brand workspace and one country is a single-market, single-brand shape; the agency case now starts at Enterprise.

What the Sitecore acquisition changes

This is the section to read if you are deciding this quarter.

If you already run Sitecore, this is now the path of least resistance. One vendor, one contract, one security review, and the roadmap points at integrating with a digital experience platform you already pay for. That is a real advantage and it is worth more than a feature comparison.

If you do not run Sitecore, you are buying a component of somebody else’s suite. Acquired products generally move in one direction: toward the acquirer’s largest customers. That usually means enterprise-first roadmaps, enterprise-first support tiers and, in time, enterprise-first pricing. None of that is a criticism, and all of it is relevant if you are a 20-person company.

The neutral read: an acquisition is a stability signal, not a quality signal. It tells you the product will still exist in two years. It does not tell you the measurement is better than a $29 tool’s, and no published study establishes that for any vendor in this category.

The tell nobody noticed: the price appeared after the sale

Scrunch publishes its pricing. Four of the vendors we reviewed this month do not: Brandlight, Bluefish, Peec AI and Evertune all route you to a demo form instead.

The timing is the interesting part. The numbers went up after the acquisition, not before it.

That is not a scandal, it is economics. A venture-backed company selling six-figure annual contracts needs a qualifying call, because the price is negotiated and the sales motion is the product’s margin. A component inside a suite does not: the parent already has the enterprise relationship, and the standalone price now exists mainly to anchor a bundle. Hiding it stops paying for itself.

What that means when you are on the call: the published $250 is a floor for the packaged product, not the number you will be quoted if a Sitecore renewal is on the table. Ask what the price is inside a suite agreement, because the answer is very unlikely to be $250 a month.

Four days later, the tiers were replaced, and the headline improved while the offer got worse

We read this pricing page on 7 August 2026 and again on the 11th. It is a different page.

Two things moved in opposite directions, and only one of them is visible from a comparison table.

The number that goes up is the one everyone quotes. Copilot and Grok were added, so the page now says nine models where it said seven. A buyer scoring vendors on engines supported would rank Scrunch higher today than four days ago.

The number that went down is the one you actually buy. On 7 August every paid tier carried all seven engines, which we verified against this same page and recorded at the time. Today the entry plan carries four, and Claude, Gemini, Meta AI, Google AI Mode and Grok sit behind a custom contract. Engine coverage was not a differentiator here; now it is the thing the tiers are cut on.

So the honest summary of the change is that Scrunch got $50 cheaper to start, and the plan you start on lost three of the engines it used to include plus five it never had. If you are tracking Claude or Gemini, the entry price is no longer $250 for you. It is whatever Enterprise costs, and that has no published number.

This also corrects what we wrote in the section above. We noted that pricing became public and the numbers went up after the acquisition, and read that as the standalone price existing to anchor a bundle. Four days later the price came down. Price was the wrong axis to watch: what moved is the packaging, and the packaging moved toward making the suite conversation necessary for anything past a single brand in a single market on four engines.

One more thing changed with the repackaging and it is worth a look if you are considering the same play: Scrunch also runs the largest programmatic comparison hub in this category. We measured whether those pages earn anything, and the ones naming Scrunch itself rank for nothing while the ones comparing two other companies do.

It is the general pattern too. Across the catalogue, the gap between the engines a tool advertises and the engines its cheapest plan actually covers is the number that decides whether a published price means anything, and Scrunch just moved from one side of that split to the other.

Buying an acquired product: the five things to settle before signing

Acquisitions change contracts more than they change software, and the changes arrive at renewal rather than at signature. If you are evaluating Scrunch this quarter, these are worth settling in writing.

1. What happens to your historical data if you leave. This matters more here than in most categories, because AI visibility data is a time series and its whole value is the comparison to last quarter. A tool you can leave with a CSV of the last 30 days is a tool you cannot leave.
2. Whether the standalone product survives. Ask directly whether Scrunch will continue to be sold to companies that do not run Sitecore, and get the answer from someone who can commit to it.
3. What the price is at renewal, in writing. Introductory pricing on a newly acquired product is a well-worn pattern. A capped uplift clause costs nothing to ask for now and a great deal to negotiate later.
4. Which support tier you land in. Acquired products get folded into the parent’s support structure, and a startup’s responsive Slack channel rarely survives the transition.
5. Whether the engine list is contractual or aspirational. Coverage in this category changes when platforms change. Ask what happens if an engine you bought the product for stops being tracked.

None of this is specific to Scrunch, and a well-run vendor will have ready answers. The questions are here because acquisition is now common in this market: Lorelight shut down entirely in October 2025 and comparison articles kept recommending it for months, which is the version of this that costs you a year.

Persona modelling, and when it earns the price gap

The feature Scrunch leans on hardest is persona modelling: instead of tracking one set of prompts, you model several buyer types and see how answers differ between them.

The argument for it is sound. A CFO and a practitioner asking about the same category get different answers, because they ask different questions and the retrieval layer resolves them against different pages. Measuring one and generalising is a real error, and cheap tools mostly cannot express the distinction at all.

The argument against is arithmetic. Personas multiply your prompt set, and the value only appears if the personas actually diverge. Many brands find they do not, and then a considerable premium has bought a segmentation that returns the same picture three times.

The way to settle it costs nothing: write ten prompts as your primary persona and ten as your secondary, run both through any tool with a free tier, and see whether the answers differ. If they do, persona modelling is worth paying for and you now know it rather than assume it. If they do not, you have saved yourself the difference between $29 and $250 a month, which is $221 a month and $2,652 a year.

The domain, since we now check every time: the company is at scrunch.com. scrunch.ai, the address most articles still link to, no longer resolves. It is one of four vendors this month whose obvious-looking address was wrong, alongside Bluefish, Brandlight and Wellows.

Where Scrunch is the right call

• You need to clear procurement. SAML/OIDC, a data API and a corporate parent will pass a security review faster than a startup will.
• You have multiple brands or personas. The persona modelling is genuinely built for that, and cheap tools mostly are not.
• You want industry prompt libraries out of the box. The 1,000 to 2,500 industry prompts save real setup time if you do not want to write your own set.
• You are standardising on Sitecore. This stops being a comparison and becomes an integration decision.

Where it is the wrong call

• You want to know whether you appear, and that is all. Promptmonitor covers six engines at $29 a month. Paying ten times that for the same answer with a better dashboard is a real risk in this market.
• You are a single founder or a small team. The seat and prompt structure assumes a marketing department.
• Your market is not English. Coverage here is the mainstream Western engines. If you sell into China, Doubao and Qwen matter and are not on this list.
• You want the measurement itself to be the product. A suite optimises for breadth. If what you need is repeated runs, control pages and attribution, that is a different purchase.

What we could not verify

Being explicit about this is the point of the review.

• Accuracy against other tools. No controlled, side-by-side test of these platforms on the same brand and prompt set has been published by anyone, us included. Any review claiming one tool is “more accurate” is asserting, not measuring.
• How many runs sit behind a reported number. This is the question that separates a defensible metric from a noisy one, and it is not documented publicly. Ask it in the demo.
• What happens to historical data if you leave. Ask before you sign, especially now that the corporate owner has changed once.

Scrunch versus the alternatives

All prices verified on 5 August 2026 from each vendor’s own page. The full comparison covers every tool we could verify, including one that shut down.

Common Questions About Scrunch

Is Scrunch still available after the Sitecore acquisition?

Yes. Scrunch continues to operate as a platform following the 3 June 2026 acquisition, and its pricing is now public rather than quote-only.

How much does Scrunch cost?

$250 a month for Core, read from the pricing page on 11 August 2026. Enterprise is custom and has no published number. Until at least 7 August the structure was different: Starter at $300 monthly or $250 annually, and Growth at $500 monthly or $417 annually. Both were withdrawn.

Why does scrunch.ai not work?

The company moved to scrunch.com. scrunch.ai no longer resolves, so any article still linking to it has not been rechecked since the move, which is worth knowing before trusting its prices.

Is Scrunch worth $250 a month?

It depends entirely on whether you are buying monitoring or procurement. If you need to know whether your brand appears, tools at a tenth of the price answer that. If you need SSO, an API, multiple brand workspaces and a vendor your security team will approve, the gap closes quickly.

What engines does Scrunch track?

Nine in total, and four of them on the entry plan. Core covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot. Claude, Gemini, Meta AI, Google AI Mode and Grok require Enterprise. Until at least 7 August 2026 all seven engines it then supported were on every paid tier, so this is a recent change. It does not cover Chinese engines such as Doubao or Qwen.

What is the best Scrunch alternative?

It depends on which half of the product you actually need. For cheap monitoring, Promptmonitor at $29 a month covers six engines. For measuring whether a change worked, that is what we build EchoWi for. For a suite you already own, Semrush sells AI Search separately at $99 per domain per month, billed annually.

Where this leaves you

Scrunch is a serious product that has just become part of a much larger company. That makes it safer and less independent at the same time, and which of those matters more depends on whether Sitecore is already in your stack.

What it does not do is settle the measurement question, because nobody has settled it. Ask any vendor in this category how many runs sit behind a number, and buy the one that answers.

Next: the full tool comparison with verified prices, and what GEO is and what the research supports.