Key takeaways
- Scrunch AI's public Core plan is $250/mo for brands and $500/mo for agencies, but that buys only 4 engines, 5,000 responses, 1 workspace, and Google SSO only, so most enterprise buyers end up quoted for Enterprise, which is custom-priced.
- Scrunch was acquired by Sitecore in June 2026 for a reported $225M. It still operates as a standalone product with the same pricing page, but enterprise contracts could start bending toward Sitecore's DXP norms.
- Extra seats, more prompts, SAML/OIDC, AXP, and API access all live behind the Enterprise wall, so the real per-brand cost for a team that needs those things is a sales conversation, not a number on a page.
- Alternatives span a wide range: Otterly.AI starts at $29/mo, AthenaHQ now has a genuinely free Essential tier plus a $295/mo Starter plan, and Profound has moved to a free-trial-plus-custom-Enterprise model that looks a lot like Scrunch's.
- Promptwatch is worth a look if what you actually want isn't just a monitoring dashboard but something that also generates and publishes the content needed to close the gaps it finds.
What Scrunch actually charges in 2026
Scrunch's pricing page is refreshingly simple to read and slightly less simple to live with. There are two named tiers for brands: Core at $250/mo, and Enterprise, which is a custom quote. Agencies get their own ladder: Agency Core at $500/mo, Agency Enterprise custom. That much is consistent across Scrunch's own FAQ and every third-party review I checked.
What's easy to miss is how tight Core actually is. It isn't just "125 prompts, 4 engines." The current pricing page lists 5,000 responses a month, one brand workspace, five competitors tracked, three AI Search Trends topics, one country, one language, one persona, a 25-page site map, one page optimization a month, basic content generation, and Google SSO only, no SAML or OIDC. Email support is the only support tier included.
That's a plan built for a single brand doing light monitoring, not a marketing org running multiple product lines or regions. The moment you need a second workspace, a second language, more personas, or a security team that requires SAML, you're not choosing a bigger self-serve tier, you're picking up the phone.
The four engines you actually get on Core
Core tracks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Microsoft Copilot. That's a reasonable starting set, but it leaves out Claude, Gemini, Meta AI, Google AI Mode, and Grok entirely. Those five extra engines are Enterprise-only. If your buyers are asking Gemini or Claude about your category, and plenty are, Core won't tell you anything about it.
The earlier Starter/Growth ladder that got retired
Earlier in 2026, some visitors to Scrunch's pricing page saw a different structure: a Starter plan around $300/mo and a Growth plan around $500/mo ($417/mo billed annually), with 700 custom plus 2,500 industry prompts, 5 personas, and 10 page audits on Growth. That ladder has since been collapsed into the current Core/Enterprise structure. If you're comparing quotes from six months ago against today's page, you're not crazy, the product changed under you.
What Enterprise unlocks, and why the quote varies
Enterprise removes the caps. Custom prompt and response volume, full site audits instead of five a month, the Agent Experience Platform (AXP), API and integration access, Looker Studio connections, MCP access, CLI access, SAML/OIDC SSO, and a dedicated account team with exec reporting. Annual prepay gets roughly two months free, a 17% discount that's consistent across every source I checked.
None of that has a published number, and that's the point of Enterprise tiers generally: price follows usage and negotiating leverage, not a fixed list. Buyers who've gone through the process describe quotes shaped by workspace count, engine coverage (all 9 versus a subset), and whether AXP is actually turned on for site-wide use versus a handful of pages.
The Sitecore acquisition changes the calculus
Here's the detail most older reviews miss: Sitecore acquired Scrunch in June 2026, reportedly for around $225M, a striking multiple for a company that had raised only $26M in venture funding before the deal. Sitecore is a digital experience platform vendor that's already past $500M in ARR, and its stated reason for the acquisition was to pair Scrunch's AI-visibility data with its own content management stack so enterprises can act on visibility gaps without leaving their CMS.
Scrunch says it's still operating as a standalone platform, and as of this research nothing on the public pricing page shows evidence of a post-acquisition price hike or a folded-in Sitecore bundle. But a $225M deal for a visibility startup usually doesn't stay pricing-neutral forever. If you're negotiating an Enterprise contract now, it's worth asking directly whether the quote assumes a standalone Scrunch relationship or an eventual Sitecore platform tie-in, because that answer affects renewal terms down the line.
The acquisition announcement also included two customer numbers worth knowing if you're building a business case: Akamai reportedly saw a 364% increase in AI-answer appearances for non-branded prompts after using AXP, and Runpod reported a 400% increase in paying customers tied to its AI search work with Scrunch. Those are the kind of numbers sales will use to justify a five-figure Enterprise quote, so go in with your own math on what a citation lift is actually worth to your pipeline.
What the real bill looks like once seats and scale enter the picture
The $250/mo headline number undersells what larger teams end up paying. A few things compound quickly:
- Extra seats beyond the included allocation have historically run around $25/mo each on some plans, so a team of four users on a plan built for one or two seats adds real monthly cost on top of the base fee.
- Agencies managing multiple client brands on separate Core subscriptions multiply the base price by client count, since there's no volume discount built into the self-serve tier.
- Anything requiring SAML/OIDC, multiple languages, or more than five audited competitors forces an Enterprise conversation regardless of budget, because those aren't add-ons on Core, they're simply absent.
If you model a mid-size enterprise brand needing 3 workspaces, 9 engines, SAML SSO, and API access, you're not comparing $250 against a competitor's $250. You're comparing an unpublished Enterprise number against whatever the alternative charges for the same feature set, and that's where it pays to get quotes from more than one vendor before committing.
How Scrunch compares to the alternatives
| Tool | Entry price | Engines at entry | Free trial/tier | Notable ceiling |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scrunch AI | $250/mo (Core) | 4 | 7-day trial, no free tier | Enterprise custom, adds 5 engines + AXP + API |
| AthenaHQ | Free (Essential) | 5 | Free Essential tier, plus $295/mo Starter | Enterprise custom, adds Oracle discrepancy detection, SSO |
| Profound | Free (Trial) | 3 | 7-day free trial | Enterprise custom, adds 6 more engines + SOC 2 |
| Otterly.AI | $29/mo (Lite) | 4 | No free tier | Enterprise from 1,000 prompts, custom |
| Rankscale | $20/mo (Essentials) | 17+ on every plan | No free tier | Enterprise at $780/mo |
| SE Ranking Visible | ~$103/mo + AI add-on | 5 | 14-day trial | Bundled with full SEO suite |
A few things jump out once you line these up. AthenaHQ used to be described as having no free option at all, but its pricing page now shows a genuinely free Essential tier with 300 credits across 5 engines, which changes the comparison meaningfully if you're testing the category before committing budget.
Profound has done something similar but in the opposite direction: it dropped its old $99/mo Starter and $399/mo Growth self-serve tiers entirely and now offers only a free trial plus custom Enterprise pricing, following its reported $180M Series D raise. That makes Profound look more like Scrunch than like a budget alternative these days, at least for anyone past the trial period.
Otterly.AI remains the honest budget play. $29/mo gets you 15 prompts across four engines, with Claude, AI Mode, and Gemini available as paid add-ons rather than bundled. It won't replace Scrunch's audit and AXP tooling, but if all you need is a citation tracker, it's a fraction of the price.
Rankscale is worth a mention because it puts 17+ engines on every plan, including its $20/mo Essentials tier, which is a genuinely different pricing philosophy than gating engine count behind Enterprise the way Scrunch and Profound do.
The bigger question: monitoring versus doing something about it
Most of this category, Scrunch included, is built around the same loop: track prompts, show citations, surface a gap, and leave the fixing to your content team. That's genuinely useful, but it's also where the price tag stops making sense for a lot of buyers. You're paying enterprise money to find out you're invisible in Gemini, and then paying your own writers separately to fix it.
Promptwatch takes a different position on that problem. It's built for the same job, tracking ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, DeepSeek, Copilot, Google AI Overviews, and AI Mode among others, but it doesn't stop at the dashboard. It logs actual AI crawler visits (ChatGPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and 400+ others) so you can see whether the bots hitting your site are actually reading the pages you think they are, and its Content Agents can plan, write, and publish GEO-optimized articles straight to Webflow, Framer, or WordPress on a schedule, either with human review or fully automated. Crisp, one of its customers, scaled to 5-10 published articles a day using that workflow and saw 2x higher conversion from AI traffic than from traditional channels.
That matters for the pricing conversation specifically because Scrunch's Enterprise tier prices in things like full site audits and AXP as premium add-ons, while Promptwatch bundles prompt tracking, crawler logs, citation analytics, content generation, and CMS publishing across its Essential ($95/mo), Professional ($245/mo), and Business ($579/mo) tiers, none of which require a sales call to see the number. It's rated 4.7/5 on G2 across 1,840+ customers, including Duolingo, Yelp, and Typeform, and its 2026 comparison of 21 GEO platforms breaks down exactly where each competitor, Scrunch included, stops at monitoring.
One caveat worth remembering
Before assuming you need the widest engine coverage money can buy, it's worth noting what Promptwatch's own data on citation behavior shows: mid-authority domains, not the biggest sites in a category, took the largest share of ChatGPT Search citations in August 2026, with domains in the DR 46-75 range capturing nearly half of all citations while the top DR 91-100 tier fell to about 3% of citations after starting the month near 7%. That's a real argument against assuming only the most expensive, broadest-coverage plan will get you cited. A well-optimized mid-tier presence competes just fine.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Scrunch AI actually cost?
Core is $250/mo for brands, $500/mo for agencies, both self-serve with a 7-day free trial. Enterprise is custom-quoted for both brand and agency use and typically gets negotiated based on workspace count, engine coverage, and whether AXP and API access are included.
Did the Sitecore acquisition change Scrunch's pricing?
Not as far as the public pricing page shows. Scrunch still lists Core at $250/mo and Enterprise as custom, the same structure it had before the June 2026 deal. Enterprise buyers should still ask directly whether a quote assumes a future Sitecore platform tie-in, since that could affect renewal terms.
Is there a cheaper alternative that covers as many engines?
Rankscale covers 17+ engines starting at $20/mo, which is unusual in this category since most competitors, Scrunch included, gate the majority of engines behind a higher or custom tier. AthenaHQ's free Essential tier also covers 5 engines at no cost.
Does any alternative combine monitoring with content creation?
Yes. Promptwatch is the main platform in this space that pairs prompt and citation tracking with automated content generation and direct CMS publishing, rather than stopping at a dashboard the way Scrunch, AthenaHQ, and Profound currently do.
If you're still building out your shortlist, the GEO software directory at bestgeosoftware.com is a reasonable place to compare more of these platforms side by side before you get on a call with anyone's sales team.