AI
When a customer in Riyadh asks ChatGPT which bank to open an account with, they do not get a page of links. They get one answer, and your brand is either in it or not. Scrunch, the AI visibility platform Sitecore bought in June 2026, is built to measure that answer and to change it. Sitecore Symposium, held in Orlando from 10 to 12 November 2026, showed how far it has come in five months.
We are a Sitecore partner and we implement Scrunch, so we have an interest here. Everything below comes from Scrunch, Sitecore, press coverage of the event, and our own session notes and audit, all listed at the end.
What Scrunch does today
Scrunch tracks where your brand is cited, missing or outperformed in AI-generated answers, and the prompts behind them. It monitors eight platforms: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Microsoft Copilot and Meta AI. Prompts can be written in any language and run as if the user were in a given country. Scrunch also shows which AI bots visit your site and which pages they read.
For sites that AI crawlers struggle to read, Scrunch serves bots a clean copy of each page. Scrunch calls the platform that does this its Agent Experience Platform (AXP), and the feature that builds and delivers the pages Agent Pages. It works through your CDN (Akamai, AWS CloudFront, Cloudflare, Fastly, Vercel or WordPress). When an AI retrieval bot asks for a page, it gets server-rendered HTML with structured summaries. People still see the normal site, and Googlebot and Bingbot are not routed to it.
Scrunch says it has more than 500 customers since it was founded in 2023. You do not need SitecoreAI to use it: Scrunch works with any tech stack, and its Starter plan has a 7-day trial.
What launched in Symposium week
| Release | What it does | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Citation Optimization | Finds the third-party pages AI answers cite for your prompts, ranks them by influence and by how feasible a placement is, shows where competitors appear instead, and drafts outreach from your approved information. | Launched 12 November 2026 |
| Imposter Detection | Flags suspected impostor sites that AI answers cite, and gives you the steps to start a takedown. | Announced with Citation Optimization |
| MarketingIQ (Sitecore) | Takes a gap Scrunch finds, drafts a fix from approved content and stages it for a person to approve. | Announced 11 November 2026; no general availability date given |
Citation Optimization matters because most of what AI cites is not yours. A Muck Rack study from May 2026, reported by CMSWire, found that 84% of citations in ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini came from earned sources, and 0.3% from paid or advertorial content. “Every AI recommendation is built on a network of publishers, reviewers, and other sources,” said Chris Andrew, Scrunch’s founder and chief executive. Scrunch is working on integrations with Noble, Stacker and Getfluence to automate more of the outreach.
Imposter Detection answers a risk most brands have not checked. It flags suspected impostor sites and provides the actions to start a takedown. Scrunch found that 17% of Fortune 500 companies had an impostor website cited in AI answers, and that in three out of four answers citing a known impostor, the AI presented it as the brand’s official source.
MarketingIQ is Sitecore’s agent for acting on what Scrunch finds. Nothing leaves staging without a person. It is not sold separately and comes with a SitecoreAI licence. Scrunch is a separate subscription, with plans tiered by the number of prompts tracked. Sitecore’s chief executive, Eric Stine, put it bluntly: “Marketing IQ is free. Scrunch is not.” Scrunch’s chief executive also said the company is adding support for WebMCP, so AI agents can interact and transact with brand sites.
These sit on top of what Scrunch released in the 100 days before the event: Knowledge Studio (generally available in SitecoreAI since 2 October 2026), Site Optimization, Agent Pages, and Content Generation, which writes content for questions that are not answered anywhere and was released the week before Symposium.
Why a recommendation is worth more than a mention
In his Symposium session, Scrunch’s chief executive described three levels of visibility: being mentioned, being cited, and being recommended. Scrunch Labs research, cited by Sitecore’s chief marketing officer, Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek, during the keynote, put numbers on the top level. Within a week of an AI platform recommending a brand to someone new, that person is:
- 182% more likely to search for the brand on Google;
- 117% more likely to visit the brand’s site;
- 185% more likely to view the brand’s products on a retailer page.
The same research found that more than 40% of AI sessions happen entirely inside the AI platform, with no web search before and no click after. For traditional search, the figure is 21.5%. When the answer is the whole visit, the answer is where you win or lose.
Eric Stine’s keynote line was that “visibility is a commodity”. Tracking without acting on it has little value. The Symposium releases are Scrunch and Sitecore moving from measuring to fixing.
What this means for brands in Arabic
For brands in the Gulf and Egypt the gap is wider in Arabic, and it is mostly not a language problem. In November 2026 we checked the Arabic home or main landing page of 19 large consumer brands in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Egypt, as raw HTML, the way most AI crawlers read it:
- 16 of 19 had no structured data written in Arabic.
- 9 of 19 had no hreflang pointing to an Arabic version.
- 17 of 19 had at least one of the gaps we checked for. Two passed every check.
Most of these sites put real Arabic text in the HTML and let AI bots in. What they skip is the labelling that tells a machine what a page is and which language it serves: weeks of web work, not a rebuild.
This is where Scrunch helps in a way generic SEO tools do not. You can run the same question in English, Modern Standard Arabic and dialect, from each market you sell in, and report Arabic as its own line. Citation Optimization then shows which Arabic pages the assistants trust. In our experience these are often aggregators, forums and old news pages, because brands publish little in Arabic. That tells you where Arabic outreach will actually move answers. If you want help with the fixes on your own site, see our AI visibility service.
Free guide, in English and Arabic
AI Search in Arabic: how Gulf and Egyptian brands get recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini and Google
A 37-page guide with the 10-question test you can run tonight, the seven failure points we see on Arabic sites, the full 19-site audit, a 90-day plan and two checklists. Every figure is sourced. The Arabic edition, البحث بالذكاء الاصطناعي بالعربية, is written for Arabic-speaking teams, not translated word for word.
Building or rebuilding an Arabic site on SitecoreAI? Our Arabic First playbook covers right-to-left design, bilingual content operations and Arabic search.
Arabic AI visibility review
Three weeks on Scrunch. Your share of answers by language and market against three competitors, the facts the assistants get wrong about you, whether AI bots can read your Arabic pages, and a ranked list of fixes.
Sources
- Scrunch press release via GlobeNewswire: Scrunch launches Citation Optimization (12 November 2026)
- CMSWire: Sitecore Scrunch launches Citation Optimization for AI search visibility (12 November 2026)
- Sitecore press release via GlobeNewswire: Sitecore introduces MarketingIQ (11 November 2026)
- PPC Land: Sitecore’s MarketingIQ drafts fixes when ChatGPT or Gemini gets a brand wrong (November 2026)
- Sitecore press release: Sitecore acquires Scrunch (3 June 2026)
- Sitecore changelog: AI discoverability features are now generally available (2 October 2026)
- Scrunch: Copilot support in Scrunch (December 2025)
- Scrunch FAQ: How Scrunch serves bot-friendly HTML and pre-rendered pages to AI crawlers
- Scrunch help centre: Languages in Scrunch
- Scrunch: Scrunch and SitecoreAI, observe, optimize and ship in one place (1 October 2026)
- Scrunch pricing: plans and 7-day Starter trial
- Sitecore Symposium 2026: 10 to 12 November, Orlando
- Arcsen notes from the Scrunch session at Sitecore Symposium, 10 November 2026.
- Arcsen audit of 19 brand sites in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Egypt, 11 and 12 November 2026. Method and results in AI Search in Arabic.
