Sitecore Scrunch Launches Citation Optimization at Symposium

Scrunch, a Sitecore company, launched Citation Optimization on Nov. 12 at Sitecore Symposium in Orlando, a tool that ranks the third-party pages cited in AI-generated answers by influence and by how winnable they are. The launch gives marketers a way to target external sources rather than only their owned content, and it follows Sitecore's reported $225 million acquisition of the AI search visibility startup, announced June 3.

What does the new capability actually do?

Citation Optimization identifies which third-party pages appear in AI answers about a brand, where competitors show up instead, and where outreach could strengthen presence. Scrunch then helps prepare targeted pitches informed by the source, the opportunity and the brand's approved information.

Scrunch founder and CEO Chris Andrew framed the launch as making an invisible network actionable. "Every AI recommendation is built on a network of publishers, reviewers and other sources that most marketers have never been able to see clearly," he said. "For the first time, marketers are able to participate in the conversations that decide whether AI recommends them."

Andrew previewed the capability during Sitecore's Day 1 keynote on Nov. 11. "Scrunch helps you see where your brand is being missed or misunderstood," he said. "In this new era, it's no longer enough to fight for clicks, you have to become the answer, and you have to enable AI to take the action."

He also made a strong measurement claim: "I would argue AI search is the first channel with 100% attribution."

Citation Optimization joins several Scrunch tools released over the preceding 100 days:

• Knowledge Studio — turns brand-approved information into a source of truth for AI
• Site Optimization — delivers a prioritized, page-by-page fix list deployable via SitecoreAI
• Agent Pages — serves an AI-readable site version to verified AI agents
• MarketingIQ integration — Scrunch data feeds Sitecore's MarketingIQ for coordinated campaigns

Scrunch data now feeds MarketingIQ, introduced on Day 1 of the Symposium, to coordinate content and campaigns across SitecoreAI. The company is also integrating partners including Noble, Stacker and Getfluence to automate additional outreach and activation steps. On the agent side, Scrunch builds agent pages and, as part of Sitecore, is adding WebMCP support so agents can interact and transact with brand sites.

How is the integration tracking five months in?

Sitecore CEO Eric Stine said Sitecore kept selling Scrunch from day one. "Scrunch was available the day that we acquired it. We just kept selling it," he said. The first sales cycle under Sitecore ran six days, and "for the month of June, Scrunch had its best month on record," selling into Sitecore's installed base and through Scrunch's agency channel.

Sitecore set 30-day targets for the first integrations. The team connected Scrunch to the SitecoreAI CMS in 28 days and to the SitecoreAI DAM in 29; those integrations became the foundation for MarketingIQ.

Scrunch remains a separate purchase. "Marketing IQ is free. Scrunch is not," Stine said. Sitecore prices Scrunch by prompts, the SitecoreAI CMS by site visits, the DAM by managed content objects, and personalization and search by events. Chief Product Officer Danny Robinson said Scrunch keeps its own roadmap: "We're giving Scrunch room to keep moving on its own and keep innovating."

What results are customers reporting?

Two early MarketingIQ customers spoke on stage. IFS CMO Oliver Pilgerstorfer said the industrial software company began its AI search work with a competitor's product, Profound. IFS moved from appearing in under 50% of citations for its target phrases to more than 75%, runs its site in 10 languages, and has traced $9.93 billion in pipeline to AI search. He estimated real influence at about 10 times that figure because first-touch attribution misses much of it.

Perficient CMO Carrie Grapenthin said her team rebuilt the company's site on SitecoreAI from scratch, cutting 2,600 pages down to 200 and losing some SEO visibility in the process. "We gave up some SEO visibility, which we're now working on with Scrunch," she said. She credited the tool with explaining itself: "It's not just telling us what to do; it's telling us why, so that the marketer can sit there and determine in their own volition, yes or no on a specific change." Recommendations range from tweaking a headline to suggesting how to change a stat so the brand becomes more citable in LLM results.

Why citations now sit at the center of discovery

The market context is stark. Semrush found 93% of Google AI Mode sessions end without a click, while AI-referred sessions grew 527% year over year as of August 2025. Gartner predicts traditional search volume will drop 25% by 2026, and 45% of B2B buyers already use AI tools during purchase research. A May 2026 Muck Rack study found 84% of citations in ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini came from earned sources; paid and advertorial content accounted for 0.3%.

Scrunch Labs research, cited by Sitecore CMO Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek at the keynote, found more than 41% of AI sessions happen entirely inside the AI platform, with no web search before and no click after. When an AI platform recommends a brand to someone new, that person becomes 182% more likely to search for the brand on Google, 117% more likely to visit its site, and 185% more likely to view its products on a retailer page within a week.

Stine pushed back on monitoring-only tools. "If the customer is still missing the answer and you're still missing the sale, then all you're paying for with a visibility tool is premium anxiety in the login screen," he said. "Visibility is a commodity, and just about anybody can do it."

Partners on the Symposium floor pointed to content quality as the bigger constraint. "We don't have a problem with the quantity of content, but we have a problem with the quality. And I'm done with AI slop," said Theresa Gutierrez of Fishtank Consulting. Siteimprove's Steve Hennigs said marketers have solved for speed and now face harder questions about creating the right content, structured the right way. Digiteins founder Yuvraj Kasture split the problem "half and half" between technical setup and content. Dataweavers' Jill Grozalsky Roberson cautioned against letting citations drive strategy: "Tell your story. Own it. Be true to yourself."

The message for CMOs: audit which third-party outlets AI tools cite for your category, then pitch them — Scrunch now sells the workflow to do it.