Key takeaways
- Scrunch AI was acquired by Sitecore in June 2026 for a reported $225M, which means buyers should ask hard questions about roadmap continuity and whether self-serve pricing survives the enterprise absorption.
- Most GEO tool comparisons are stale within weeks. Reverify pricing, engine count, and trial terms on the vendor's own page the same day you run your test, not from a blog post written in Q1.
- A useful trial isn't about staring at a dashboard. Run the same fixed set of prompts across platforms, log results in a spreadsheet as ground truth, and compare that against what the tool reports.
- Prioritize tools that show you why you're missing, not just that you're missing: crawler logs, citation-type breakdowns, and content workflows matter more than a pretty visibility score.
- Free-trial friction is a real filter. Some vendors (Profound, for one) offer no self-serve trial at all, which kills the "one afternoon" plan before it starts.
Why Scrunch buyers are suddenly shopping around
If you're reading this, you've probably already got Scrunch AI open in another tab, wondering whether to renew. Fair. Scrunch built a decent reputation fast after launching out of beta in March 2025, picked up brands like Lenovo, Skims, and Crunchbase, and raised roughly $19-26M along the way. Then in June 2026, Sitecore bought it for a reported $225M.
That's not a disaster for existing customers. But it is the kind of event that should make anyone renewing a contract pause. Enterprise DXP vendors don't always keep self-serve pricing alive once a tool gets folded into a bigger sales motion. If Scrunch's $250/month Core plan quietly disappears in favor of "talk to sales," that changes the calculus for every mid-market team that picked Scrunch because it was approachable.
So this guide isn't "is Scrunch bad now." It's a checklist for testing any Scrunch alternative, including Scrunch itself, in a single afternoon, so you're not making a decision based on a sales deck or a six-month-old review article.
Step 1: reverify pricing before you touch the product
GEO tool pricing moves fast enough that it's genuinely unreliable to trust a comparison article, including parts of this one, without checking the vendor page the same day. Scrunch itself illustrates why: earlier in 2026 it ran a Starter/Growth ladder ($250/$300 and $417/$500), then settled into a Core ($250/mo, 4 engines, 125 prompts) and Enterprise (custom, 9 engines) structure by August. Peec AI repriced entirely to EUR, went geo-priced, and switched to annual billing on August 14, 2026. If you're comparing five tools, open five tabs and screenshot the pricing page before you start testing. Don't rely on memory or an old bookmark.
Here's a snapshot as of September 2026, but treat every number as provisional:
| Tool | Entry price | Engines at entry | Free trial | Standout feature |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scrunch AI | $250/mo (Core) | 4 (9 on Enterprise) | 7-day, no card | Crawler analytics + site audits, no execution layer on lower tiers |
| Otterly.AI | $29/mo ($25 annual) | 4, others as add-ons | 7-14 days, no card | Cheapest credible starting point; 1,000 GEO URL audits included |
| Peec AI | ~EUR70-89/mo | Pick 3 of 6 models | 7-day, no card | Unlimited seats on every plan |
| Profound | $99/mo (ChatGPT only) | 1 at entry, up to 10 | None, demo only | Real-user prompt volume data from consumer panels |
| AthenaHQ | $95/mo annual | 8+, credit-based | Free tier available | Built by ex-Google/DeepMind team, prompt-volume estimation |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | $50-699/mo by index | 6 + social monitoring | Free demo/AWT suite | Prompts built from real "People Also Asked" data, not synthetic |
Notice Profound has no self-serve free trial at all. If your afternoon plan depends on hands-on testing, cross it off the list unless you can get a live demo scheduled same-day, which most sales teams won't do on short notice.
Step 2: build your own ground truth before opening a single tool
This is the part almost everyone skips, and it's the single most important hour of the afternoon. Before you let any vendor's dashboard tell you where you stand, run the test yourself.
Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews in incognito or private mode (personalization and login state will skew what you see otherwise). Pick 10-15 prompts that mix:
- Branded queries ("is [your brand] good for X")
- Category queries ("best tools for X")
- Comparison queries ("[your brand] vs [competitor]")
- Problem-based queries ("how do I solve X" where your product is a plausible answer)
Run each prompt once per platform and log it in a spreadsheet: prompt, platform, was your brand cited (yes/no), which competitors showed up, which URLs got cited, and any factual errors. This becomes your ground truth. When you later plug the same prompts into a trial account, you'll immediately spot whether the tool's numbers are believable or wildly off.
This matters because LLM output is non-deterministic. A tool that only queries a prompt once per cycle gives you a single snapshot, not a trend. Ask every vendor, directly, how many times they run each prompt per engine per cycle. Three to five runs is the minimum for a result you can trust; one run is basically a coin flip dressed up as data.
Step 3: the actual trial, hour by hour
With ground truth in hand, here's how to spend the rest of the afternoon across two or three trial accounts.
First 30 minutes: setup and prompt import. Import your exact 10-15 prompts, not the tool's suggested defaults. Suggested prompts are designed to make the tool look good. Your own prompts tell you whether it works for your business.
Next 45 minutes: cross-check citations against your spreadsheet. For every prompt where the tool claims a citation, click through to the actual source URL. Does the page say what the tool claims it says? Does the brand mention actually exist, or is the tool inferring it from a tangential match? This single-run-versus-multi-run gap is exactly where cheaper monitoring-only tools tend to fall apart.
Next 30 minutes: dig into what the tool can't show you. Ask the sales rep, live, during the trial: does this track AI crawler visits to my site? Does it show citation types (how-to, listicle, product page, forum post)? Can it tell me which of my pages are actually getting read by ChatGPT's or Claude's crawler versus just indexed? Scrunch's own differentiator is pairing visibility data with crawler and site-audit data, so if you're evaluating it against a pure prompt tracker like Otterly or Peec, this is the gap to probe. If the alternative you're testing has none of this, you're buying a scoreboard with no way to act on the score.
Last 15 minutes: pressure-test the "what do I do next" question. This is where most GEO tools quietly fail. A visibility score is nice. A prioritized list of pages to fix, or better, a tool that drafts and publishes the fix, is what actually moves the number. Reviewers of Scrunch specifically flag the "no execution layer" complaint on lower tiers; it becomes, in their words, an expensive dashboard once you've already learned you're invisible for a category query. If you want the loop closed between insight and action, Promptwatch is worth putting in the same trial slot. Its Content Agents generate and publish GEO-optimized pages straight to Webflow, Framer, or WordPress, and its Unified Actions list turns crawler and citation data into a prioritized to-do list instead of a static score.
Step 4: sanity-check the engine-coverage claims
Engine count is the number everyone leads with in sales calls, but the number by itself is misleading unless you know how each engine actually behaves. ChatGPT cites roughly 5 sources per web-search-triggered response, a genuinely scarce inventory, while Google AI Overviews cites closer to 10 and Perplexity holds steady around 10 as well, according to Promptwatch's average sources per response data. Microsoft Copilot is the outlier, swinging from under 2 to nearly 17 sources per response within weeks, which tells you Microsoft is still rebuilding its retrieval system. If a tool you're trialing reports flat, suspiciously round citation counts for Copilot, that's a red flag worth asking about directly.
Also worth checking: how ChatGPT itself searches has changed materially in 2026. Average fan-out queries per response dropped from roughly 2.15 in early December to close to 1.0 by April, and the queries themselves got shorter, collapsing from about 117 characters down to roughly 53, per Promptwatch's ChatGPT query fanout tracking. If a vendor's prompt-strategy advice during your demo still assumes long, sentence-style fan-out queries, their content recommendations are built on an outdated model of how ChatGPT actually searches. Ask.
And on the crawler-analytics differentiator specifically, since it's Scrunch's headline feature: OpenAI's share of verified AI crawler requests fell from 94.8% in the week of June 8-14, 2026, to 79.8% by early September, according to Promptwatch's AI crawler traffic data. That's a fast-moving mix. If a tool's crawler dashboard updates monthly instead of daily or weekly, it will miss shifts like this entirely, and any conclusions you draw from it about which bots to prioritize will be stale by the time you act on them.
Step 5: weigh reviews correctly, then decide
Scrunch sits at 4.6/5 on G2 across 73 reviews, and independent scoring that blends G2 data with public docs puts it closer to 3.9/5 overall, with value-for-money as the weakest subscore at 3.6. That gap between the two numbers is instructive: star ratings measure satisfaction with support and interface, not whether the tool actually gets you cited more often. Worth knowing too, there's essentially no statistical correlation between a GEO tool's own G2 or Capterra review volume and how often that same tool gets cited inside ChatGPT itself, so don't use review scores as a proxy for AI-citation skill; use them only for support quality and ease of use, which is what they actually measure.
Once your afternoon is done, you should have three concrete things: a ground-truth spreadsheet, a side-by-side of what each trial tool reported against that spreadsheet, and a clear answer to "can this tool tell me what to fix, or just that something's broken." Make the decision on those three, not on whichever sales deck had the nicest slides.
If you want to keep browsing beyond the handful covered here, the GEO software directory at bestgeosoftware.com lists a wider set of monitoring and optimization platforms worth a second look, and agenticseotools.com is a useful starting point if execution and automated content publishing matter more to you than monitoring alone.