Sitecore acquired Scrunch, as announced in early June. The acquisition is a clear signal of where Sitecore is heading — and how digital marketing is changing in the AI era.
It is an acquisition worth watching because it suggests that the rules for visibility, performance, and brand perception are shifting.
As Jakob Huus Andreasen, Director of Sales at Alpha Solutions, says:
“Sitecore has just acquired Scrunch — and that says something important about where the platform is headed.”
“Scrunch is an AI Customer Experience Platform that helps brands understand and improve how they appear in LLM searches and AI-generated answers, which increasingly shape how buyers perceive a brand before they ever visit a company’s website.”
From Website Performance to AI Visibility
For many years, digital performance has centered on well-established disciplines: SEO, paid search, content quality, technical performance, personalization, conversion rate optimization, and marketing automation.
Those disciplines are not going away.
But a new layer has been being added: How is your company understood, referenced, and recommended by AI systems?
When buyers use ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, or Google AI Mode to research vendors, products, pricing, alternatives, and market trends, a growing part of the buying journey takes place outside the company’s own website.
Increasingly, the primary visitor to a website is a machine acting on behalf of a human.
That raises important questions:
Is your brand being mentioned at all?
Is it being mentioned accurately?
Are your competitors more visible in AI-generated answers?
Do AI tools understand your category structure?
Which sources does AI use to describe your company?
Is your website structured, updated, and machine-readable enough to be understood correctly?
These are exactly the types of questions Scrunch and similar platforms are trying to help marketing teams answer.
What Does the Acquisition Say About Sitecore’s Roadmap?
The acquisition should be viewed in the context of Sitecore’s broader move toward SitecoreAI.
“This is the latest step in a larger shift. With SitecoreAI, Sitecore has brought CMS, CDP, personalization, search, and digital assets together in one system, with AI embedded directly into workflows. The Scrunch acquisition shows that Sitecore’s ambitions go even further — into the layer where brands compete for attention in a world increasingly shaped by AI-generated answers,” says Jakob Huus Andreasen.
If AI-generated answers increasingly shape customer research, digital experience is no longer limited to the channels a company controls directly.
A brand’s digital presence must be understood as a broader information ecosystem, where the website, metadata, content, product information, reviews, external sources, and AI interpretations all interact.
