Key takeaways
- Sitecore acquired Scrunch on June 3, 2026, reportedly for around $225 million (unconfirmed by Sitecore). Scrunch keeps operating as a standalone product for now, with tech "progressively integrated" into Sitecore's DXP over an unannounced timeline.
- The 7-day free trial still exists, but it only covers the $250/mo Core plan, requires a credit card, and auto-converts to a paid subscription if you don't cancel in time.
- Onboarding is split sharply by tier: Core is self-serve with email support only, Enterprise gets hands-on onboarding, strategy calls, and a dedicated account team.
- Pricing and feature bundling have shifted more than once in the weeks around the deal, including a restructuring in August 2026 that dropped the headline price but moved five of nine tracked AI engines behind the Enterprise tier.
- If you're a small team or solo operator, cheaper alternatives with less gating are probably a better starting point than Scrunch right now.
Why this acquisition matters to anyone about to sign up
When a vendor gets bought mid-year, the fine print tends to move faster than the marketing site gets updated. That's exactly what's happening with Scrunch. Sitecore announced the acquisition on June 3, 2026, folding Scrunch's Agent Experience Platform (AXP) into its own AI-powered digital experience platform. Sitecore CEO Eric Stine framed it as helping customers "understand how they are represented in AI-generated answers and automatically act on those insights." Scrunch CEO Chris Andrew, now technically a Sitecore executive, said the deal "accelerates Scrunch's product roadmap rather than redirecting it."
That's the kind of statement every acquired CEO makes. Sometimes it's true. Here it's worth checking against what actually happened to the trial, the pricing page, and the onboarding tiers since June, because those are the parts that affect you the moment you type in a credit card number.
What actually changed after the deal closed
A few concrete things:
- Scrunch is still operating under its own brand at scrunch.com (the old scrunch.ai domain no longer resolves, which is itself a useful tell if you land on a review that still links to it).
- Sitecore says integration with its DXP is happening "progressively," with no public timeline. In practice, that means the product you sign up for today is still Scrunch's own stack, not some merged Sitecore/Scrunch super-tool.
- In July 2026, Scrunch published a blog post repositioning itself away from "AI visibility tool" language toward being the originator of the "Agent Experience Platform" category, built around an Observe-Understand-Deliver loop. It also shipped two new features: Signals, for automated anomaly detection on brand representation, and Explorer, a natural-language analytics layer accessible via Scrunch's MCP server.
- The acquisition press release leaned on customer numbers to justify the deal: Akamai reportedly saw a 364% increase in brand presence for non-branded prompts and a 218% jump in citations after using AXP-enabled pages, and Runpod reported a 400% increase in paying customers tied to its AI search optimization work. Worth noting these are Sitecore's own cited figures, not independently audited.
None of that is alarming on its own. What's more relevant if you're actually evaluating Scrunch right now is what happened to pricing and trial terms in the weeks around the deal.
The free trial: what's included, and the part nobody advertises clearly
Scrunch runs a 7-day free trial, but only on the Core plan. Sign-up happens through Scrunch's own accounts portal, separate from Sitecore's checkout flow.
Here's the detail that trips people up: Scrunch's homepage advertises a free "AI visibility audit" with the line "see results in 30 seconds, no credit card required." That's real, but it's a lightweight lead-gen tool, not the actual product trial. If you want the 7-day trial of the real Core plan, with full prompt tracking and site audits, you do need a credit card, and you will be automatically billed at the end of the 7 days unless you cancel first. Several third-party roundups conflate these two things and claim the whole trial is card-free. It isn't.
What the 7-day Core trial actually gives you:
- Up to 125 unique prompts tracked for your site
- Brand presence, citation, and sentiment tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Microsoft Copilot
- Competitor performance tracking
- 5 site audits to flag optimization opportunities
- Access to the AI Search Trends feature and automated insights
That's a reasonable amount to test in a week if you already know what you're looking for. It's a tight window if you're new to the category and still figuring out which prompts matter for your brand.
Onboarding: self-serve unless you pay for Enterprise
This is where the tier split gets sharp. Core plan customers get self-serve onboarding and email support only. There's no hand-holding, no strategy calls, no dedicated rep walking you through setup. Enterprise customers get the opposite: hands-on onboarding, strategy and review calls, a dedicated account team, exec and board-level reporting, and both email and Slack support.
Reviews reflect that split. Scrunch holds a 4.6/5 rating on G2, and one reviewer specifically praised onboarding, calling it "the best I've experienced from a software company." That review almost certainly came from an Enterprise customer, because a separate third-party scorecard (Radarkit, last updated April 2026) rates Scrunch's "ease of use & onboarding" at only 3.9/5, noticeably lower than its monitoring (4.6/5) or insights (4.5/5) scores. A 4-star G2 review flagged a related gap: the platform's improvement suggestions are sometimes "minimal," with little guidance on how to actually implement them. If you're on Core and expecting someone to walk you through fixing what the audits flag, that's not what you're paying $250 a month for.
SOC 2 Type II compliance does help on the enterprise side. It's one of the few things that makes procurement teams comfortable moving fast, and it's cited across multiple reviews as a genuine strength.
Pricing has moved more than once since the acquisition, and the moves aren't neutral
This is the part worth paying closest attention to if you're comparing quotes right now. Scrunch's public pricing page has been restructured at least twice in recent months:
- Before roughly early August 2026, some visitors saw a Starter plan at $300/mo and a Growth plan at $500/mo, with all paid tiers covering all 7 tracked AI engines.
- On August 7, 2026, an independent check confirmed that structure: Starter $300, Growth $500, 7 engines included at every tier.
- Four days later, on August 11, 2026, the page was rebuilt into just two tiers: Core at $250/mo and Enterprise at custom pricing. The product now tracks 9 AI engines total, but Core only gets 4 of them (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot). Claude, Gemini, Meta AI, Google AI Mode, and Grok all moved behind the Enterprise wall. Prompt allowance also dropped, from a previous "350 custom + 1,000 industry" structure to a flat 125 unique prompts.
Net effect: the entry price dropped $50, but three engines that used to be included at the entry tier got pulled out, alongside five newly added ones. The headline number got cheaper. The actual package got smaller. One reviewer's blunt read on this: the published $250 is "a floor for the packaged product, not the number you will be quoted if a Sitecore renewal is on the table." Expect the real number to depend heavily on whether you're already a Sitecore customer.
Current pricing at a glance
| Plan | Price | AI engines covered | Prompts | Onboarding | Support |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Core | $250/mo | 4 (ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Copilot) | 125 unique | Self-serve | Email only |
| Enterprise | Custom | 9 (adds Claude, Gemini, Meta AI, AI Mode, Grok) | Custom | Hands-on, strategy calls, dedicated team | Email + Slack |
| Agency Core | $500/mo | Same as Core | Custom | Self-serve | Email only |
| Agency Enterprise | Custom | Same as Enterprise | Custom | Hands-on | Email + Slack |
If you signed up for the older Starter/Growth pricing before August 11, don't assume your renewal quote will look anything like what's on the page today. Verify before you sign anything, and ask the sales rep directly what happens at renewal if the page has changed again by then.
Who should actually consider Scrunch right now
Two groups make sense:
If you're already running Sitecore for content management or personalization, buying Scrunch is close to a no-brainer logistically. One vendor, one contract, one security review, and presumably tighter integration down the line once Sitecore finishes the "progressive" merge. That's a real advantage that has nothing to do with whether Scrunch's AI visibility data is better or worse than a competitor's.
If you're not on Sitecore and you have the budget and procurement muscle for an Enterprise deal, Scrunch's 9-engine coverage, AXP content delivery layer, and SOC 2 compliance are legitimate enterprise-grade features. Named customers like Lenovo, Skims, Penn State, Crunchbase, Akamai, ADP, Publicis, and Seer Interactive suggest it holds up at that scale.
Who probably shouldn't bother: solo operators, freelancers, and small teams testing the AI-visibility category for the first time. Getting locked into a $250/mo Core plan that only covers 4 of the 9 engines the product actually supports, with no hands-on onboarding to help you make sense of what you find, is a rough way to learn a new category. Several independent reviewers make the same point and point toward cheaper starting tools instead.
What to check before you hand over a credit card
An acquisition is a stability signal, not a quality signal. It tells you Scrunch will probably still exist in two years. It tells you nothing about whether its citation tracking is more accurate than a competitor's, because no independently audited accuracy study exists for this category yet. Before you start the trial:
- Screenshot the current pricing page. It has changed at least twice in recent months and will likely change again as Sitecore's cross-sell motion kicks in.
- Ask explicitly which of the 9 tracked engines your quoted plan covers. "9 LLMs supported" in marketing copy does not mean your plan includes all 9.
- Confirm in writing what happens after the 7-day trial if you don't cancel. Auto-conversion to a paid plan is the default behavior.
- If onboarding matters to you and you're not buying Enterprise, budget time to self-serve. Core doesn't include a human walking you through setup.
Where to look if Scrunch doesn't fit your budget or team size
The AI visibility and GEO category is crowded enough now that Scrunch's enterprise-first repositioning doesn't have to be the end of the search. Otterly.AI is a commonly recommended cheaper starting point for teams just learning the category.
Peec AI is another lighter-weight option worth a look if you want prompt tracking without an enterprise sales process.
On the other end, if what you actually want is a platform that goes beyond monitoring into fixing what it finds, Promptwatch is worth comparing directly. It tracks visibility across a similar range of AI engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok, Copilot, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, and more), but it also ships AI crawler logs showing exactly when bots like ChatGPTBot and PerplexityBot hit your pages, Reddit and YouTube citation tracking that most competitors skip entirely, and Content Agents that plan, write, and publish GEO-optimized pages straight to your CMS. Where Scrunch's Core plan leaves you with a dashboard and self-serve support, Promptwatch's Unified Actions turn the same kind of data into a prioritized to-do list, and its Agent Chat lets you ask plain-language questions about your own citation and traffic data.
If you want a broader lineup to compare against, the GEO software directory at bestgeosoftware.com covers a wider set of platforms across different price points and feature depths.
The bottom line
Scrunch's 7-day free trial is still real, still functional, and still gives you a decent week of Core-plan access if you already know what you want to test. What's changed since the Sitecore acquisition is less about the trial mechanics and more about the ground shifting under the pricing and packaging around it. A headline price that dropped while coverage narrowed is exactly the kind of post-acquisition repackaging worth watching for. Onboarding remains a Core-plan weak spot and an Enterprise-plan strength, which is a fairly normal split for enterprise software, but one you should go in expecting rather than discovering after you've already signed.
If you're evaluating this for your own team, treat the acquisition as a reason to double-check every number on the pricing page the day you're ready to buy, not as a reason to trust the marketing copy at face value.