As more people turn to AI chatbots like ChatGPT to look things up on the internet, the way companies approach their online presence has to change. Scrunch AI wants to help enterprises better prepare for a world in which more AI bots and agents visit their website than humans do.
Scrunch AI says its platform helps companies audit and optimize how they appear on various AI search platforms and gives them better visibility into how AI web crawlers interact with their online information. Its system updates every three days and lets companies see how their information is presented in AI search results from customer prompts of various demographics.
Chris Andrew, a co-founder and CEO of Scrunch (pictured above, on the right), said the platform also helps companies find information gaps and solve inaccuracies. For example, the startup can help companies find out that an AI search engine was sourcing their pricing information from an outdated part of their website, and then they could delete that section or update it to improve the search result.
Andrew, a former chief product officer at Hearsay Systems, said he got the idea for Scrunch AI when he began to realize a change in his own online behavior.
“I realized I was visiting fewer websites,” Andrew said. “I was expecting an answer from ChatGPT instead of 20 links from Google. And so I thought the first thing that’s being outsourced at scale to AI agents and crawlers is browsing. Browsing is inefficient by the very definition of the word, and if that’s true, the entire customer journey is going to change.”
He took the idea to a few CMOs he had worked with to validate the idea, and found that CMOs were starting to notice their companies were getting high-quality referral traffic from AI search engines. But, identical prompts about their companies produced different results across different AI search platforms.
“Your program is no longer what you say it is,” Andrew said. “It’s what you say it is, plus third parties, plus competitive sites. You’re going to want to have monitoring and visibility against that, at scale.”
Andrew launched Scrunch AI in fall 2023 with co-founder and CTO Robert MacCloy (pictured above, on the left), and launched the product in November 2024. Now, the company has signed 25 customers, including enterprises like Lenovo and BairesDev, and Penn State University.
Now, Scrunch AI has raised a $4 million seed round led by Mayfield in addition to several angel investors who include Clara Shih, the former co-founder and CEO of Hearsay Systems; TJ Parker, a co-founder of PillPack; and Bryant Chou, a co-founder of Webflow. The company plans to use the funds to continue building the product.
Of course, Scrunch AI isn’t the only company to identify the opportunity in helping companies navigate the new world of AI search. Profound is looking to help companies monitor their SEO presence through a series of dashboards where brands can input prompts and track various results, and it has raised $3.5 million in venture capital.
More traditional marketing and PR agencies like Avenue Z have started to advertise that they can help companies improve how they show up in AI search, too. This market definitely has potential to grow.
Andrew thinks his startup stands out thanks to its focus on the customer journey as opposed to just how a brand shows up in initial search results. He feels the company is also taking it a step further by not just focusing on search results by a human through an AI search engine, but rather on searches performed by AI agents.
“I think people were like, ‘How do we use AI to make our website better?’ And my mindset was like, ‘Your website’s going to need to be for an agent or crawler in the future,’” Andrew said. “That theory has kind of really played out with our customer base at the enterprise level saying our brand is no longer what we say it is. It’s what ChatGPT, Gemini, Siri, Google AI Overviews say it is.”
