Key takeaways
- Sitecore acquired Scrunch on June 3, 2026, and Scrunch has repositioned as an "Agent Experience Platform." For mid-market teams on the Core plan, that means real uncertainty about pricing, product direction, and whether the standalone self-serve product stays a priority.
- The most urgent task is exporting your data. Scrunch's API only reaches back 90 days, so anything older may be gone for good once your subscription lapses.
- Scrunch's Core plan caps you at 5 user licenses, 4 LLMs, and 1 page optimization per month. Several alternatives offer unlimited seats and more engines for similar or less money.
- The best replacements for mid-market teams in 2026: Promptwatch (end-to-end optimization, not just monitoring), Peec AI (unlimited seats, multi-language), Profound (enterprise-grade monitoring), and Otterly.ai (budget monitoring).
- Run both tools in parallel for 2–4 weeks before canceling. Visibility scores differ between platforms, and you need overlapping data to normalize the new baseline.
Why mid-market teams are leaving Scrunch in 2026
Scrunch built a real business helping brands see how they show up in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Their 2026 survey of 600+ marketing and PR professionals, "Moving fast, flying blind," captured the moment well: teams know they need to act on AI search, but most aren't. Scrunch's own advice was blunt — "miss it, and you may not get a second chance."
Then two things happened that changed the calculus for mid-market buyers.
First, Sitecore acquired Scrunch on June 3, 2026. Scrunch is now "a Sitecore company," folded into Sitecore's content platform. Chris Andrew stayed on as CEO, and the roadmap talk is all about enterprise integration. That's great news if you're an Akamai-scale customer. If you're a 20-person marketing team on the Core plan, it's a legitimate question mark. Acquisitions like this usually mean pricing restructures, enterprise-first feature gating, and less energy on the self-serve tier.
Second, Scrunch repositioned as an "Agent Experience Platform" (AXP). The July 2026 announcement introduced Signals (anomaly detection) and Explorer (self-serve analytics). The problem for mid-market teams: the AXP layer, full site audits, API access, SSO, and 9-LLM coverage are all Enterprise-gated. Core customers get 4 LLMs, 5 seats, 1 country, 2 languages, and one page optimization per month. You're paying $250/month for monitoring while the "action" part of the product lives above your tier.
None of this makes Scrunch a bad product. It makes it a product whose center of gravity has shifted. If your team fits the new direction, staying is reasonable. If it doesn't, here's how to leave cleanly.
Step 1: Audit what you actually use in Scrunch
Before you export anything, figure out what's worth exporting. Pull your team's actual usage over the last 90 days:
- Which prompts do you actively monitor, and which are dead weight? Most teams find 30–40% of their prompt set is stale.
- Which reports do you send to leadership? Those metrics need equivalents in the new tool, or your reporting cadence breaks.
- Do you use personas, tags, or competitor tracking? These are the structured assets that transfer.
- Are you using the query API or scheduled pulls? If your data flows into a BI tool, you'll need to rebuild that pipeline.
One quirk worth knowing: Grok no longer contributes citations in Scrunch's exports, though its presence, ranking, and sentiment data still flow. If you've been benchmarking Grok citation performance, capture that history now or lose it.
Step 2: Export your data before the 90-day window closes
This is the step people regret skipping. Scrunch's API provides 90 days of historical data. Once your subscription ends, anything older than that window is likely unrecoverable.
Scrunch supports export via CSV, Excel, and API (a query API for aggregated metrics, a responses API for raw AI responses). Here's what to pull, based on Scrunch's own help documentation:
| What to export | Where in Scrunch | Format | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prompt list (text, stage, persona, topics, tags, branded status, platforms) | Configure → Exports | CSV | This is the backbone of your migration. Rebuild this in the new tool first. |
| Personas (definitions and metadata) | Configure → Exports | CSV | Direct transferable asset. |
| Mentions rate, position average, sentiment average, citations rate | Explorer → Export Data | CSV/Excel | Build the metric/breakdown/filter combo you want first; exports run async and cap at 8 queries per export. |
| Citation domain breakdown | Explorer → Citation Exports | CSV | Summary view, one row per domain. |
| Citation URL breakdown | Explorer → Citation Exports | CSV | Detailed view, one row per URL + prompt + week. This is your richest historical asset. |
| Raw AI responses | Responses API | API | For teams doing their own analysis or feeding a data warehouse. |
| Aggregated metrics | Query API | API | 90-day history limit applies. |
Practical tips from Scrunch's own docs:
- Explorer exports run asynchronously and are capped at 8 queries per export, so plan multiple export batches if you have a large prompt set.
- The Home page "print to PDF" option is a visual snapshot only. Fine for a slide, useless for data analysis.
- If you run scheduled pulls via Airflow, GitHub Actions, or Cloud Scheduler, run one final full pull before cancellation.
Step 3: Choose your replacement (honestly)
Not every "Scrunch alternative" article is written for your situation. Mid-market teams (roughly 10–200 marketing-adjacent staff, $250–$800/month tool budgets) have specific constraints: seat flexibility, multi-model coverage without enterprise pricing, and ideally some execution help, not just dashboards.
Here's the 2026 field, with verified pricing:
| Tool | Starting price | Seats | Engines | Execution tools? | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scrunch (Core) | $250/mo | 5 | 4 | Limited (1 page optimization/mo) | Enterprise-bound teams |
| Promptwatch | $95/mo (Essential) | Varies by plan | All major LLMs + AI Overviews + AI Mode | Yes — content agents, CMS publishing, unified actions | Teams that want monitoring and fixing in one platform |
| Peec AI | €70/mo (Starter) | Unlimited | 3–6 by tier, add-ons available | Basic | Multi-language, multi-region teams |
| Profound | $99/mo (Starter, annual) | 1 (3 on Growth) | 1–3 by tier, up to 11 enterprise | Monitoring only | Enterprise teams with analyst resources |
| AthenaHQ | ~$295/mo | Unlimited | Up to 8 | Advisory support | Teams wanting hands-on guidance |
| Otterly.ai | $29/mo (Lite) | Unlimited | 4 + add-ons | No (monitoring/audit only) | Budget-conscious small teams |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | $199/mo add-on + base plan | Per Ahrefs plan | 1, or 6-engine bundle at $699/mo | No | Teams already deep in Ahrefs |
A few honest observations:
Profound raised a $96M Series C at a ~$1B valuation and has strong monitoring, but the Starter tier is ChatGPT-only with a single seat and no exports. Real functionality starts at Growth ($399/mo). It's a monitoring platform, not an optimization one.
Peec AI restructured pricing in August 2026 to EUR-denominated geo-priced tiers (€70/€180/€360). Unlimited seats on every plan is the direct answer to Scrunch's 5-seat cap, and 115+ language support is genuinely differentiated if you operate internationally.
Otterly.ai is the cheapest credible monitoring start, but it's monitoring and audits only. If your Scrunch complaint was "it diagnoses but doesn't help fix," Otterly won't solve that.
Ahrefs Brand Radar looks affordable at $199/month until you realize it requires a base Ahrefs subscription ($129–$449/mo) plus the add-on. Full 6-engine AI visibility runs ~$828–$1,148/month all-in. Only worth it if Ahrefs is already your SEO home.
The recommendation most mid-market teams land on
If your core frustration with Scrunch is that monitoring without execution leaves you stuck, look at Promptwatch. It's the one platform in this price range that closes the loop: crawler logs show why you're visible (or not), citation analytics show where AI finds your content, visitor analytics tie AI traffic to actual conversions, and content agents plan, write, and publish GEO-optimized content straight to your CMS. It monitors every major engine (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, Copilot, AI Overviews, AI Mode) and is used by 1,840+ brands and agencies with a 4.7/5 G2 rating. Essential starts at $95/month with a 7-day trial; Professional at $245/month is the tier most Scrunch Core teams map to.
If budget is the driving factor, Peec AI and Otterly.ai are solid monitoring-first alternatives:
And if you want to browse the full field, the GEO software directory at bestgeosoftware.com keeps a maintained list.
Step 4: Rebuild your tracking in the new tool
Here's where migrations usually go wrong: teams import their prompt list verbatim and wonder why the new tool's numbers look wrong. They look wrong because every platform measures differently.
A few things to know about how AI answers actually work, because it affects how you interpret any tool's numbers:
- ChatGPT cites roughly five sources per web-search answer; Google AI Overviews and Perplexity cite around ten. A "visibility score" against a 5-citation answer is a different game than a 10-citation one. (Promptwatch Data: average sources per response)
- AI search is far less winner-take-all than Google. In June 2026, even the top-cited domain in ChatGPT Search held under 4% of citations, and Reddit's share dropped ~40% in a single month (from 6.11% to 3.71%). Don't assume last quarter's citation patterns predict this quarter's. (Promptwatch Data: ChatGPT citation share, June 2026)
- Product pages are now the most-cited format in ChatGPT Search at ~32.8% of daily citations as of July 2026, nearly double their March share. If your prompt set is all informational, you're missing where the citations actually are. (Promptwatch Data: ChatGPT citation types, July 2026)
So when you rebuild:
- Re-import prompts, but re-score them. Use your Scrunch export as the starting inventory, then cut stale prompts and add product/commercial prompts based on current citation-type data.
- Recreate personas and competitor sets. These transfer directly from your CSV exports.
- Expect baseline numbers to differ. A 34% visibility score in Scrunch might read as 28% or 41% elsewhere, because sampling, geography, and model versions differ. That's normal. What matters is the trend line after week two.
- Reconnect your data pipeline. If you were pushing Scrunch data to Looker Studio or a warehouse via API, rebuild those pulls against the new tool's API before your Scrunch access ends, so there's no reporting gap.
Step 5: Run in parallel, then cut over
Don't cancel Scrunch the day the new tool is live. Run both for 2–4 weeks:
- Week 1: New tool collects data. Don't make decisions yet.
- Week 2: Compare visibility scores, citation counts, and sentiment between platforms. Note systematic differences (one tool samples more heavily, one covers different engines) and document the conversion factor for your reporting.
- Week 3–4: Shift your reporting cadence to the new tool. Keep Scrunch as a sanity check.
- Cancel Scrunch only after your first full monthly report from the new tool has gone to leadership without anyone asking "where's the old number?"
One scheduling note: check your Scrunch contract terms before canceling. Some teams on older Scrunch tiers reportedly had annual commitments; if you're mid-term, the parallel period is a good time to negotiate timing with your new vendor (many will align billing or extend trials to match your cancellation date).
Step 6: Use the switch as a forcing function
Here's the thing about migrating tools: it's a rare chance to reset your AI search program, not just your vendor. Most teams migrating off Scrunch discover their monitoring was fine but their response to the monitoring was thin. Scrunch's own survey said it: teams know they need to act, but most don't.
Three things worth doing in the first 60 days on the new platform:
- Fix the crawl layer. Whatever tool you pick, check how AI crawlers experience your site. If bots hit errors or can't parse key pages, no amount of prompt tracking matters. (Cloudflare's CEO announced in June 2026 that bot traffic overtook human traffic for the first time, at roughly 57.4% to 42.6%. Your AI-crawler readiness is now a real infrastructure concern, not a niche metric.)
- Close one content gap per sprint. If your new tool offers content gap analysis or briefs, use it immediately. Data without output is how teams end up migrating again in two years.
- Pick 5 prompts that matter commercially and own them. Not 125. Five. Product pages are the most-cited format in ChatGPT now; pick prompts where a product page of yours could legitimately earn the citation, and make it earn it.
A migration checklist you can actually use
- Audit Scrunch usage; cut stale prompts
- Export prompts, personas, and citation history (CSV + API)
- Capture Grok citation history before it disappears from exports
- Final scheduled API pull before cancellation
- Choose replacement based on seats, engines, and execution needs
- Rebuild prompt set with current citation-type data in mind
- Reconnect BI/reporting pipeline
- Run 2–4 week parallel period
- First monthly report shipped from new tool
- Cancel Scrunch; archive all exports in cold storage
Bottom line
The Sitecore acquisition doesn't mean Scrunch is dying. It means Scrunch is becoming a different product for a different buyer. If that buyer is you, stay. If it isn't, the migration is very doable: export within the 90-day window, pick a tool that matches your actual constraints (seats, engines, execution), run parallel for a month, and use the switch to finally close the gap between monitoring and doing. The teams that win in AI search were never the ones with the best dashboard. They're the ones who act on it.