In the past three months, Scrunch AI says it has grown its paying customer base by more than 50% month over month. Its pitch is direct: traditional websites are no longer optimized for how discovery works. As large language models are increasingly browsing on users’ behalf, Scrunch wants to make sure those bots actually understand what your company does.
Founded in late 2023 by Chris Andrew and Robert MacCloy, Scrunch AI is building infrastructure for AI-native marketing. Andrew, formerly chief product officer at Hearsay Systems, says the inspiration came from noticing his own shift in search behavior. “I realized I was visiting fewer websites,” he told TechCrunch in March. “I was expecting an answer from ChatGPT instead of 20 links from Google.”
That realization prompted a broader insight: discovery is moving from human browsing to AI retrieval. And yet, most websites remain designed for people. Bright visuals, interactive carousels, and marketing copy don’t translate well for LLMs, which prioritize clear, structured text. “AI wants simple, accurate, structured content,” Andrew said to IBM. “Interactive or complex layouts make it harder for AI to extract answers.”
From Monitoring to Influence
Scrunch initially offered tools that let companies audit how their brand appears in AI-generated answers, essentially reverse engineering what language models were retrieving and why. The system refreshes every three days and tracks how AI agents interpret a brand’s content, which prompts they surface in, and even how often AI visits a given site.
But monitoring was never the end goal. With its Agent Experience Platform (AXP), Scrunch is pushing into the next phase: not just tracking AI behavior, but actively shaping it.
AXP creates a parallel version of a brand’s website, structured for LLM retrieval. That means converting visual assets into machine-readable text and tailoring page structure to suit AI ranking mechanisms, without changing the human-facing version of the site. “The primary buyer is no longer a person at a screen, but an AI agent scanning the web for answers,” Andrew wrote in a company blog post. The company says AXP is currently in pilot with enterprise clients and will roll out more broadly later this year.
Business Momentum
Scrunch just raised $15 million in Series A funding, led by Decibel with participation from Mayfield, Homebrew, and others. That brings total funding to $19 million. According to Axios, much of the company’s growth to date has been inbound. Investors point to the startup’s early traction and its focus on long-term platform infrastructure, rather than point solutions. “Scrunch has the unique advantage of having built the foundation first: collecting data, learning from real-world behavior, and shipping with speed,” said Jon Sakoda of Decibel.
Scrunch’s revenue model is based on enterprise subscriptions. It also recently launched an agency-facing product designed for firms managing multiple brand clients. Clients report an average 40% increase in referral traffic from AI sources and up to 4x improvement in visibility across generative platforms, according to the company.
Others are eyeing the same opportunity. Profound, a competing startup, raised $20 million to provide similar monitoring dashboards for AI search. Traditional marketing agencies are beginning to advertise AI search optimization services, and enterprise marketers are still figuring out what moves the needle.
The field remains early, but the stakes are rising. IBM’s global SEO lead estimates that although traffic from AI remains much smaller than from traditional search, it converts at nearly double the rate. “It’s still early days,” IBM’s Matthew Blackshaw-Marschinke said, “but these users show higher intent and growing trust in the content.”
Relearning the Rules of Discovery
Scrunch’s founders believe this behavior shift will only accelerate. “More than 70% of Fortune 1000 websites are difficult or impossible for AI crawlers to interpret,” Andrew said in a press release. “And companies continue to spend billions on traditional search strategies misaligned with how discovery works today.”
That discovery process now increasingly involves AI intermediaries, tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, which select and summarize content for users rather than pointing them to websites. Marketers can no longer rely on front-page search rankings. “Your brand is no longer what you say it is,” Andrew told TechCrunch. “It’s what ChatGPT, Gemini, Siri, Google AI Overviews say it is.”
