Key takeaways
- Scrunch was acquired by Sitecore in June 2026, and its Core plan ($250/mo, 125 prompts) now sits inside an enterprise DXP roadmap, a bad sign for self-serve buyers who just want a prompt tracker.
- Non-branded, buyer-research prompts ("best CRM for a 50-person sales team") behave differently from branded prompts, and most tools' default prompt libraries are built for the latter, not the former.
- Peec AI ($95/mo) and Otterly.ai ($29/mo) are the cheapest serious entry points; Profound quietly killed its self-serve brand plans in September 2026 and now only offers a 7-day trial or custom enterprise pricing.
- Look for a tool that separates branded from non-branded scoring, tracks prompts per model (not blended), and can trace visibility back to pipeline, not just mention counts.
- Promptwatch adds crawler logs, content gap analysis, and automated content publishing on top of prompt tracking, useful if you want a platform that fixes the gap it finds, not just reports it.
Why Scrunch isn't the default pick anymore
Scrunch built its reputation on one genuinely distinct idea: a content-delivery layer (it calls this AXP, Agent Experience Platform) that serves AI-optimized versions of your pages directly to crawlers, on top of the usual prompt tracking. Its Akamai case study is the proof point everyone cites: a 364% jump in AI brand presence for non-branded prompts and an 85% rise in citations, achieved without touching the human-facing site.
That's a real capability. But two things changed in 2026 that matter to a B2B SaaS team evaluating it today.
First, Sitecore acquired Scrunch in June 2026, reportedly for around $225 million according to Bloomberg's reporting on the deal. Scrunch's own "about" page still hadn't acknowledged the acquisition as of late August, which is its own small red flag. The practical concern for a buyer isn't the price tag, it's what happens to a $250/month self-serve tier once it lives inside an enterprise digital experience platform roadmap. Analysts covering the deal put it plainly: when a few-hundred-dollar tier sits inside an enterprise vendor's stack, self-serve is rarely where the roadmap attention goes.
Second, pricing has gotten murky. Scrunch's live pricing page lists Core at $250/mo for 125 prompts across 4 models, but third-party reviews from mid-2026 describe a different structure entirely, a $300/mo (or $250 annual) Starter with 350 custom prompts and 1,000 industry prompts, and a $500/mo Growth tier. Either Scrunch changed its packaging mid-year or the market is confused about what it actually sells right now. Neither is reassuring if you're trying to budget a quarter out.
None of this means Scrunch is bad. It means B2B SaaS teams, especially ones focused specifically on non-branded, buyer-research prompt tracking rather than enterprise content delivery, have good reasons to look elsewhere.
What "non-branded, buyer-research prompt" tracking actually requires
Before comparing tools, it's worth being precise about what you're tracking, because most vendor default prompt sets get this wrong out of the box.
A branded prompt includes your company or product name ("Is Clari SOC 2 compliant?") and tests whether the AI describes you accurately. A non-branded prompt strips the name out entirely ("best forecasting software for a 40-rep sales team") and tests whether the AI would recommend you unprompted. These are not the same metric, and blending them into one visibility score hides the number that actually matters to a CRO: how often you show up when nobody asked for you by name.
A widely cited academic audit of 215 commercial prompts (Jack et al., 2026) found that smaller brands frequently fail to surface at all on non-branded prompts, while category leaders get retrieved but not always recommended. That gap, between being retrieved and being recommended, is exactly what a good tracker needs to isolate.
A few practical rules, drawn from prompt-library guidance that's held up well through 2026:
- Don't trust a vendor's default prompt set as representative of your buyers. Build from real language: site search queries, CRM call notes, support tickets, community threads.
- Track engines separately. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews behave differently enough that blending them into one score erases useful signal.
- Skip early-funnel awareness prompts if your bandwidth is limited. B2B SaaS shortlisting mostly happens at the consideration stage, so that's where tracking budget should go first.
- Watch prompt-set bloat. A tight library of 40-60 well-differentiated prompts, varied by persona, competitor, and buying stage, beats 300 near-duplicates.
One more thing worth knowing: the citation slots you're competing for aren't evenly sized across engines. Promptwatch's data on average sources per response shows ChatGPT typically cites around 5 sources per web-search response, roughly half of what Google's AI Overviews cites (about 10), which has stayed steady over time. Perplexity sits close to Google at almost exactly 10 sources with very little variance. That means ChatGPT is the more contested surface and AI Overviews is the more forgiving one for a mid-authority SaaS domain trying to break in.
The alternatives worth evaluating
Peec AI
Peec is the cheapest serious entry point and, notably, it explicitly classifies each tracked prompt as branded or non-branded inside the product, which is exactly the distinction most teams are trying to build manually in a spreadsheet elsewhere. Starter is $95/mo for 50 prompts across 3 models in one project and one country; Pro is $245/mo for 150 prompts and 3 countries; Advanced goes to $495/mo with Looker Studio integration. Unlimited seats on every paid plan is a real advantage for a SaaS org where marketing, product, and sales all want a look at the same dashboard.
Otterly.ai
Otterly is the budget option, starting at $29/mo for 15 prompts, scaling to $189/mo (100 prompts) and $489/mo (400 prompts). The catch: Claude, Google AI Mode, and Gemini are paid add-ons on every tier, so a Standard plan can quietly balloon to $357/mo once you add the models your buyers actually use. Fine for a lean team validating the category before committing budget; less fine once you need full model coverage.
Profound
Profound changed dramatically in September 2026. Until June it had published self-serve pricing ($99/mo Starter, $399/mo Growth); after its $180M Series D, it pulled both self-serve brand plans entirely. As of late September, brands get a free 7-day trial (50 prompts/day, no export or API) or a custom enterprise quote, which competitors estimate lands somewhere between $2,000 and $5,000+/mo. If you're a mid-market SaaS team without enterprise budget, Profound effectively priced itself out of your search this quarter. Agencies can still buy in at $99/mo plus $399/mo per client workspace.
AthenaHQ
Athena's free Essential tier is unusually generous, $25 in credit, 300 credits, 5 of its 9 supported models, unlimited seats, no card required. But there's no mid-tier: the next step up is Starter at $295/mo for 3,600 credits across all 9 engines. If your team can live inside the free tier's limits for testing, it's a good way to validate non-branded prompt coverage before paying anything.
HubSpot AEO
At $50/mo standalone (25 prompts, 3 engines), this is worth a look mainly if you're already inside the HubSpot ecosystem, since prompts become effectively unlimited inside Marketing Hub Enterprise. Outside that context it's thin, and its free one-time AI Search Grader is a reasonable sanity check before you commit to any paid tool.
Ahrefs Brand Radar
The case for Ahrefs here is different from the others: instead of relying on a curated prompt set you build yourself, its prompt database is derived from over 243 million real People-Also-Ask queries, plus third-party citation tracking most dedicated trackers skip. For a B2B SaaS team trying to discover non-branded buyer-research prompts they hadn't thought to test, that's a genuinely useful angle, discovery rather than pure confirmation.
Promptwatch
Where Promptwatch differs from the pure trackers above is that it doesn't stop at telling you your non-branded visibility score is low, it tries to close the gap. Content gap analysis maps your existing pages against what AI engines are actually citing for a given prompt, scores the coverage gap, and generates a content brief with brand instructions, competitor context, and internal linking suggestions. Its Content Agents can then draft and publish directly to Webflow, Framer, or WordPress on a schedule, either through a review inbox or fully automated.
On the monitoring side it covers ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, Copilot, DeepSeek, Mistral, Meta Llama, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, with prompt-level search volume and difficulty scoring, plus query fan-out data showing how a single buyer prompt splits into sub-queries. That last piece matters more than it sounds: Promptwatch's own data on ChatGPT query fan-outs shows the platform began using the site: operator at scale in August 2026, jumping from roughly 0.4% to 17% of fan-out queries almost overnight, while average searches per response nearly doubled. Translation for a SaaS marketer: your own domain is now a direct retrieval target inside ChatGPT's search behavior, so thin or unindexed product pages are costing you answers you'd otherwise win.
It also tracks AI crawler logs (which bots hit which pages, and whether they error out), which none of the pure trackers above offer, and Reddit/YouTube citation reporting, channels that matter a lot for B2B SaaS buyer research and that most competitors ignore entirely. Pricing starts at $95/mo for Essential (50 prompts, 6,000 responses, all models, 5 AEO articles/month) with a 7-day free trial, scaling to $245/mo Professional and $579/mo Business.
Comparison table
| Tool | Entry price | Branded vs non-branded split | Models tracked | Content generation | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scrunch AI | $250/mo | No explicit split | 4 (9 on Enterprise) | AXP page delivery only | Enterprise teams wanting the AXP delivery layer |
| Peec AI | $95/mo | Yes, built-in | 3 (choice of) | No | Cheapest explicit branded/non-branded tracking |
| Otterly.ai | $29/mo | No | 4 base + paid add-ons | No | Lean teams validating the category |
| Profound | Trial only / custom | No | Up to 9 (Enterprise) | AI-assisted articles (Growth, discontinued) | Enterprise budgets only, post-Sept 2026 |
| AthenaHQ | Free (300 credits) | No | 5 of 9 on free tier | No | Free validation before committing |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | Included in Ahrefs plans | No, but PAA-derived discovery | Multiple | No | Discovering prompts you hadn't thought to track |
| Promptwatch | $95/mo | Yes, plus prompt volume/difficulty | 12+ including AI Mode, Claude Code | Yes, full pipeline to CMS | Teams that want tracking and the fix in one platform |
How to choose
If your only goal right now is confirming you show up (or don't) for a handful of non-branded prompts, Peec AI's explicit branded/non-branded split at $95/mo is the fastest, cheapest way to get a real answer. If you're not ready to pay anything, AthenaHQ's free tier or HubSpot's one-time AI Search Grader will get you a first read.
Where it gets more interesting is once you've confirmed the problem, low visibility on consideration-stage prompts, and need to actually do something about it. That's the gap between a tracker and a platform. Scrunch's AXP delivery layer addresses this at the enterprise end, but its post-acquisition pricing uncertainty makes it a harder sell for a self-serve SaaS buyer right now. Promptwatch is the more complete option for teams who want the diagnosis (crawler logs, citation gap analysis, prompt difficulty scoring) and the fix (content briefs, automated publishing, Unified Actions) inside one subscription rather than stitching a tracker to a separate content tool.
For a broader look at the category, including tools built specifically around GEO content production rather than pure monitoring, the directory at bestgeosoftware.com is worth a scan before you commit a budget line to any single vendor.
Frequently asked questions
Is Scrunch still a good option for B2B SaaS in 2026? It still has a genuinely distinct feature, the AXP content-delivery layer, and the Akamai case study is real. But post-Sitecore-acquisition pricing is inconsistent between its own site and third-party reviews, and self-serve buyers should expect less roadmap attention going forward.
What's the difference between a branded and non-branded prompt, practically? A branded prompt names your product and tests accuracy ("does the AI know what we do"). A non-branded prompt describes the buyer's problem with no company name and tests whether you'd be recommended unprompted. Track them separately; a brand can nail 90%+ of branded prompts while barely cracking double digits on neutral recommendation rate.
How many non-branded prompts should a B2B SaaS team actually track? Most practitioners land on 15 to 60 well-differentiated prompts rather than hundreds of near-duplicates, varied by persona, competitor set, and funnel stage, with consideration-stage prompts prioritized over early awareness ones.
Does Promptwatch replace an SEO tool or complement one? It complements traditional SEO and works alongside a broader content or SEO stack; teams looking to combine AI visibility work with a full SEO/GEO strategy (audits, technical SEO, content production) sometimes bring in an agency like 1001 SEO Media to run the program end to end rather than managing each tool in isolation.