Alhena AI and Scrunch AI solve AI search visibility from opposite ends of the same problem. Scrunch serves reformatted, machine-readable versions of your pages to AI crawlers at the CDN layer. Alhena measures which of your products and pages AI engines actually recommend, generates fixes for the underlying content, and attributes the resulting traffic to checkout revenue.
Scrunch was acquired by the digital experience platform Sitecore in June 2026, so the choice is now between a component of an enterprise suite and an independent, e-commerce-first platform. If you run on Sitecore and want a crawler-delivery layer, Scrunch is the natural fit. If you run an independent Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, or Salesforce Commerce Cloud store and want to know which SKUs win in AI answers and what that is worth, Alhena is built for that.
Both are AEO platforms, part of the same shift from ranking in a list of links to being recommended inside an AI answer. This guide compares the two on approach, engines, product-level tracking, revenue attribution, ownership, and price, and answers the two questions Scrunch customers are asking most: what the Sitecore acquisition changes, and whether serving different content to AI crawlers is safe.
Key takeaways
- Scrunch AI optimizes the input to AI engines by serving reformatted pages to retrieval crawlers at the CDN layer. Alhena AI optimizes and measures the output, tracking what engines answer and joining it to revenue.
- Scrunch was acquired by Sitecore in June 2026 for a press-reported figure of roughly $225 million, terms not officially disclosed. The roadmap is converging with Sitecore's DXP, and standalone continuity for independent brands is an open question to raise at renewal.
- Scrunch's differentiated strength is crawler-level content delivery through AXP. Alhena's is SKU-level visibility, rendering analysis, live catalog sync, and revenue attribution that joins AI-engine traffic to checkout events.
- Serving different content to AI crawlers is an unsettled tactic. Scrunch defends it as format-only, some practitioners flag it as cloaking-adjacent, and Alhena avoids the question by improving the single canonical page.
- Fit rule: Sitecore stack or crawler-delivery priority points to Scrunch. An independent Shopify or DTC store that needs product-level visibility and provable revenue points to Alhena.
Alhena vs Scrunch AI at a glance
A one-line cell cannot capture whether a difference matters for your store. Read the sections that follow for the reasoning and the honest concessions.
| Capability | Alhena AI | Scrunch AI (now part of Sitecore) |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | E-commerce brands selling a catalog online | Enterprise marketing teams, increasingly Sitecore DXP customers |
| Core approach | Measure what engines answer, generate content fixes, attribute the traffic to revenue | Serve AI-optimized parallel pages to retrieval crawlers, plus monitoring and content recommendations |
| Engines tracked | 5: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, all in every paid plan | 6+: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Meta AI |
| Prompt and persona tracking | Topics and prompts, auto-generated plus custom; competitor auto-discovery | Custom and industry prompts, plus buyer persona tracking (3 to 5 personas by tier) |
| SKU-level product tracking | Yes, per-topic ChatGPT product cards with is-your-product flags and invisible-bestseller detection | Brand and page level; not catalog or SKU native |
| Answer rendering analysis | Yes, distinguishes shopping product cards from plain text mentions | Not offered as a product-card rendering view |
| Revenue attribution | Native: classifies AI-engine traffic and joins it to checkout and cart events, benchmarked to your sitewide baseline | Reports brand-presence and citation lifts from case studies; no native purchase-event join |
| Live catalog sync | Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, Salesforce Commerce Cloud | Not a catalog integration; content is optimized page by page |
| Ownership and roadmap | Independent company, e-commerce focused | Owned by Sitecore; roadmap converging with the Sitecore DXP suite |
| Entry pricing | Free tier, then Essentials at $199 per month | Starter at $250 per month billed annually ($300 month-to-month) |
| Free option | Free tier included | 7-day free trial of Starter, no credit card |
What Scrunch AI does: serve optimized pages to AI crawlers
Scrunch AI's signature product is its Agent Experience Platform (AXP), and it is a genuinely distinct idea. AXP intercepts requests from real-time AI retrieval bots at the CDN layer, where Scrunch integrates with Akamai, Cloudflare, and Vercel, and serves those bots a stripped-down, machine-readable version of the page. Scrunch's own documentation describes it plainly: the platform serves optimized content only to real-time AI retrieval bots such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, while Google and Bing indexing crawlers continue to see your normal site, so traditional SEO remains unchanged. One example on Scrunch's site shows a pricing page compressed from roughly 123,916 tokens to roughly 1,255 tokens for the bot.
The problem this solves is real. Many retail pages are heavy with scripts, tracking, and layout markup that make them expensive for a retrieval model to parse as it assembles an answer. If a bot times out or truncates, your content never makes it into the response. Delivering a clean, compact version to the crawler directly raises the odds your page is read and cited.
Scrunch also publishes outcome numbers. In a Scrunch case study, AXP-enabled pages for the technology company Akamai showed a 364% increase in brand presence for non-branded prompts, nearly five times the baseline, plus 85% more citations and a 133% increase in ChatGPT specifically, measured from December 2025 to January 2026. Treat these as vendor-reported results: they come from Scrunch's own case study, describe one enterprise brand, and are not an independent or controlled measurement. They are a reasonable signal that the approach can move citation share, not a guarantee of the same lift for your catalog.
Scrunch's AXP is purpose-built for teams whose primary goal is serving compact, machine-readable page versions at the crawler and CDN layer. That approach is most relevant when complex page delivery prevents retrieval bots from parsing the canonical experience reliably.
What Alhena does: measure the answer, fix the content, attribute the revenue
The internal shorthand is a loop: see it, fix it, prove it.
Alhena works on the output side of the same pipeline. Instead of changing what the crawler receives, Alhena's AI Visibility platform measures what the engine actually answers, identifies why a competitor is winning a given prompt, generates a content fix, and then tracks whether AI-referred visitors convert.
See it. Alhena tracks your visibility across five engines, ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude, all included in every paid plan. Its dashboard has six tabs: Overview, Prompts, Citations, Fan-out queries, Content AI visibility, and Competitors. The Citations tab groups sources by domain and by individual page and attaches a 0 to 100 Domain Rating, so you can see which authorities the engines lean on. The Competitors tab auto-discovers every brand in your answer set, not only the ones you registered, and shows the prompts where a rival is top-ranked and you are absent.
Where Alhena diverges most from brand-level tools is SKU-level tracking. AI shopping answers do not recommend brands, they recommend specific products, often rendered as a card with a price, an image, and a merchant name. Alhena tracks visibility at the level of those product cards per topic, flags whether the surfaced product is yours, and detects invisible bestsellers, the items that sell well on your own site but never surface in AI results. It also performs answer rendering analysis, distinguishing a full shopping product card from a passing text mention, because the two are worth very different amounts of attention.
Fix it. Alhena identifies content gaps, generates FAQ and product-detail-page recommendations, and produces content fixes you can apply. To be precise about scope, Alhena generates fixes and suggestions; it does not silently publish changes to your storefront on its own. The action lives with your team, which is usually what a brand wants for its own catalog pages.
Prove it. No other AI visibility platform matches this today. Alhena classifies incoming AI-engine traffic by referrer and UTM into per-engine buckets, then joins those sessions to checkout and cart events and benchmarks the result against your sitewide baseline. Because Alhena also runs first-party on-site shopping and support agents, handling real shopper conversations across web chat, email, Instagram DMs, and WhatsApp, the visibility data and the purchase data live in one system rather than being stitched together after the fact. The result is an answer to the question every other tool leaves open: not just "were we mentioned," but "did being mentioned lead to a sale." Our AI search revenue attribution guide walks through the method, and our first-party data thesis explains why owning the on-site agent matters for it. What those agents hear also feeds forward: real shopper questions inform which prompts Alhena tracks and which content gaps it prioritizes, an input a crawler-side platform never sees.
What the Sitecore acquisition changes
On June 3, 2026, Sitecore announced it had acquired Scrunch. Neither company disclosed the financial terms. Bloomberg reported a figure of roughly $225 million, citing people familiar with the deal, and other outlets have repeated it as a reported, not confirmed, number. Treat the price as press-reported.
The strategic logic is clear from the announcement: Sitecore is combining Scrunch's AXP and monitoring with its own digital experience platform, and the press release already refers to Scrunch as a Sitecore company. The announcement does not publish a standalone-product commitment or an integration timeline. That silence is not a criticism; it is the open question a careful buyer should raise at renewal.
Here is a fair reading for different buyers. If you already run Sitecore, this acquisition is good news. A crawler-delivery and AI-monitoring layer that plugs into the DXP you already operate is exactly the kind of consolidation that reduces vendor sprawl. If you are an independent Shopify or DTC brand, the questions worth asking are whether standalone Scrunch continues to be sold and supported on your timeline, whether the roadmap will keep prioritizing use cases that do not touch Sitecore's suite, and what a future migration would look like if the answer is no. None of this is settled, and none of it should be assumed either way.
Is serving different content to AI crawlers cloaking?
This is the substantive technical debate around Scrunch's approach, and it deserves both sides rather than a verdict.
Scrunch's position is that AXP is not cloaking. In its framing, the substance of the content is the same, only the format changes, and the optimized version is served to real-time retrieval bots rather than to the search indexers, so Google and Bing still see the standard page. On that reading, AXP is closer to serving a mobile layout or a print stylesheet than to deceptive cloaking.
The counter-position, raised by several search and GEO practitioners, is that serving materially different bytes to bots than to humans is the definition search engines have long used for cloaking, which Google prohibits. Writing on the topic, Conductor argues that AEO cloaking is a risky AI visibility tactic and that vendors are repackaging an old technique in new language. Google's own guidance treats content parity between what bots and users see as the safe default, and Google's John Mueller publicly dismissed the idea of serving markdown-only pages to AI systems.
The honest answer in July 2026 is that this is unsettled. AXP is a legitimate, thoughtfully engineered approach that many enterprises are adopting, and it may prove entirely safe. It also carries a category of risk that measurement-and-fix approaches do not: if an engine decides that format-divergent delivery violates its guidelines, the pages relying on it are exposed. Alhena's approach sidesteps the question by improving the single canonical page every visitor and bot sees, so there is no second version to defend. Which trade-off is right depends on your risk tolerance and how much you trust the durability of the tactic.
What Scrunch customers on Shopify should evaluate
Four questions decide whether to stay, add, or switch.
Do you need crawler delivery, or content that is simply good?
AXP's value is highest when your pages are too heavy for retrieval bots to parse. If your pages are already clean and structured, a measure-and-fix platform gets you most of the way with less architectural commitment.
Do you need commerce depth?
Scrunch tracks at the brand and page level with persona segmentation. If you need to know which SKUs appear, whether the card rendered correctly, and which bestsellers are invisible, that is catalog-native tracking Scrunch was not designed for.
Do you need to prove revenue?
If your mandate is to show finance that AI search produced sales rather than mentions, you need attribution that joins AI-referred sessions to checkout events. That is the piece a delivery and monitoring layer does not provide.
Whose roadmap are you buying?
Ask Scrunch directly about standalone continuity, support timelines, and what a migration looks like if the answer changes. Get it in writing before you renew.
For many independent brands the answer is not either-or in the short term: keep a monitoring tool or delivery layer while adding the revenue-attribution and SKU-level layer, then consolidate once the Sitecore roadmap for standalone customers is clear. Neither one replaces the SEO platform you already run, whether that is Semrush or another suite, because AI search visibility sits alongside organic rank tracking rather than on top of it. If you are also weighing the enterprise category leader, our Alhena versus Profound comparison covers that decision.
Where Scrunch is genuinely the better choice
A comparison that only flatters the publisher is not useful. For a Sitecore customer, the integrated roadmap is a decisive advantage. Scrunch's crawler-delivery architecture is also a strong fit for teams that want to manage retrieval at the CDN layer.
If your buying process runs through distinct personas across seven engines including Meta AI, Scrunch's coverage is broader than Alhena's five. And if your pages are heavy and reformatting them for retrieval bots is your priority, AXP is purpose-built for that and has published enterprise results behind it. Alhena's enterprise motion is also younger than Sitecore's, which matters for procurement-heavy deployments.
The verdict
The Sitecore acquisition clarified what Scrunch AI is: an enterprise AI-search optimization layer, strongest at delivering content to crawlers, now part of a digital experience suite. That is a good thing to be, and for Sitecore customers it is the obvious choice.
It also sharpens what Alhena is: the AI visibility platform built e-commerce-first, where visibility data, an on-site AI agent, and purchase outcomes live in one system, so the metric is not brand mentions but products recommended and revenue earned. Scrunch tells you your pages were served to the bot. Alhena tells you which of your products the engine recommended, and whether that recommendation turned into a sale. For an independent online store, that second answer is usually the one the business is asking for.
Alhena AI (founded 2022 by ex-LinkedIn engineers, rebranded from Gleen AI in February 2025) is an e-commerce AI platform spanning an AI Shopping Assistant, Support Concierge, Voice AI, and AI Visibility (AEO and GEO tracking), with a free tier and paid plans from $199 per month. You can compare tiers on Alhena's pricing page.
See which of your products AI engines recommend
Track five engines at the SKU level, fix the gaps, and tie the answer to checkout revenue.
Frequently asked questions
Alhena versus Scrunch AI, the Sitecore acquisition, and how AI search visibility fits the rest of your stack.
Scrunch AI serves reformatted, machine-readable versions of your pages to AI retrieval crawlers at the CDN layer, so bots receive content that is cheaper to parse. Alhena AI works on the output side: it measures which products and pages AI engines actually recommend across five engines, generates content fixes, and attributes AI-referred traffic to checkout revenue. In short, Scrunch optimizes what crawlers read, while Alhena measures and improves what engines answer and ties it to sales.
Scrunch AI is an AI search visibility platform, not a traditional SEO tool. It does not do keyword research or organic rank tracking the way an SEO platform like Semrush does. Its two halves are a monitoring tool for AI search engines and the Agent Experience Platform, which serves reformatted pages to AI crawlers. Since the Sitecore acquisition it is increasingly positioned as an enterprise layer inside a digital experience suite rather than a standalone AEO product.
No. Scrunch tracks visibility at the brand and page level with buyer-persona segmentation, which suits considered B2B and enterprise buying journeys. It does not offer catalog-native, SKU-level product tracking. Alhena tracks visibility per product card in AI results, flags whether the surfaced product is yours, and detects invisible bestsellers, the items that sell on your site but never appear when an AI engine recommends products in your category.
Scrunch has broader coverage. It monitors ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, and Meta AI. Alhena covers five engines, ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude, all included in every paid plan. If tracking Meta AI or the widest possible engine set is your priority, Scrunch is stronger on breadth.
Neither published engine list names Grok or Microsoft Copilot as of July 2026. Scrunch lists ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, and Meta AI. Alhena lists five AI search engines: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude. If Grok or Copilot coverage is a hard requirement, confirm it with each vendor before you sign, and ask how quickly new engines are added. Coverage shifts every time a major AI model ships, so treat any list, including this one, as a July 2026 snapshot.
For an independent Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, or Salesforce Commerce Cloud store, we think Alhena is the best fit, and since we publish this guide you should weigh that accordingly. The reasoning is narrow and testable: e-commerce teams need SKU-level tracking, live catalog sync, and revenue attribution, and those three capabilities are what most AI visibility tools lack. For a Sitecore stack, Scrunch is the better answer. For a B2B enterprise brand with persona-driven journeys and no catalog, Scrunch is also stronger. There is no single best AI platform for every team, only a best fit for your stack and your mandate.
As of July 2026, Scrunch continues to operate, and Sitecore describes it as a Sitecore company while combining Scrunch's technology with its digital experience platform. Sitecore has not published a standalone-product commitment or an integration timeline. If you are an independent brand rather than a Sitecore customer, ask Scrunch directly about long-term standalone availability and get the answer in writing before you renew.
Sitecore announced the acquisition on June 3, 2026, and did not disclose the financial terms. Bloomberg reported a figure of roughly $225 million, citing people familiar with the deal, and other outlets have repeated it as a reported rather than confirmed number. Treat the $225 million as press-reported, not officially confirmed by either company.
Mostly, and increasingly so. Scrunch was built for enterprise marketing teams, its case studies feature enterprise brands, and the Sitecore acquisition points the roadmap further toward enterprise DXP customers. A mid-market DTC brand can still buy the Starter plan, but the product's center of gravity, from persona tracking to CDN-layer deployment across Akamai, Cloudflare, or Vercel, assumes enterprise resources. If you have an enterprise SEO team and a CDN you control, that fits well. If you are a five-person marketing team on Shopify, the enterprise architecture is overhead you may not need.
Ask three questions before you renew. Do you need crawler-level content delivery, or are your pages already clean enough that well-structured content is enough on its own? Do you need SKU-level product tracking and live catalog sync, which are built for Shopify-style stores rather than Scrunch's brand-and-page level? And do you need to prove revenue by joining AI-referred sessions to checkout events? If commerce depth and revenue proof matter more than crawler delivery, an e-commerce-first platform like Alhena is worth evaluating alongside Scrunch.
It is an unsettled question in 2026. Scrunch argues its Agent Experience Platform is not cloaking because the substance stays the same and only the format changes, and it serves the optimized version to real-time AI retrieval bots rather than to Google and Bing indexers. Some search and GEO practitioners counter that serving materially different content to bots than to humans is the classic definition of cloaking, which Google prohibits. Alhena avoids the debate by improving the single canonical page that every visitor and bot sees.
AEO, or answer engine optimization, is the practice of getting an LLM to cite and recommend you inside an AI answer. It is used more or less interchangeably with GEO, generative engine optimization. Classic SEO optimizes for a position in a ranked list of links. AEO optimizes for whether you appear in the response at all, and whether the citation points back to your store. Most teams now run both: an SEO platform for keyword research and rank tracking, and an AI search visibility tool for what the engines actually say. Alhena and Scrunch are both AEO platforms working the same optimization problem from opposite ends.
They solve different problems. Semrush is a general SEO platform whose core strengths are keyword research, backlink data, and organic rank tracking across a large historical index, and it has extended that suite with AI search reporting. Alhena and Scrunch are purpose-built for AI search optimization. If your team already runs Semrush, the practical question is not Semrush versus Alhena but what Semrush does not cover for a store: SKU-level product visibility in AI results, per-engine revenue attribution, and crawler-level delivery. Verify current Semrush AI visibility features directly, since that part of the suite is moving quickly.
Usually yes. Traditional SEO still feeds AI search, because the pages an LLM cites are largely the pages that already rank, so keyword research and rank tracking in an SEO platform such as Semrush stay part of the workflow. What an SEO tool cannot tell you is which prompt produced the answer, which competitor was recommended instead of you, or whether an AI-referred session converted. Most e-commerce teams run an SEO platform and an AI search visibility platform side by side, with one shared content workflow between them.
Only partially. GA4 can show referral sessions from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI engines once you configure the channel grouping, which tells you that AI search sent traffic. What GA4 cannot tell you is which prompt produced the answer, whether your product was the one recommended, or which competitor appeared alongside you. GA4 is also blind to the impression inside the AI answer itself, where a shopper reads a recommendation and never clicks. That gap is why a dedicated analytics layer exists: Alhena classifies AI-engine traffic per engine, joins it to checkout events, and benchmarks it against your sitewide baseline. Keep GA4 as the system of record and use the AI platform for prompt-level and product-level detail.
Ask both vendors directly, because this is where reporting workflows usually break. If your marketing team already builds dashboards in Looker Studio next to GA4 and Semrush data, you want an API or a native Looker Studio connector rather than screenshots of a vendor dashboard. Confirm three things in the demo: whether an API is available on your paid plan, whether historical prompt data is exportable, and whether AI answer metrics and revenue metrics can land in the same Looker Studio report as the rest of your analytics.
Agent analytics is the emerging practice of measuring AI agents and crawlers as a distinct audience from human visitors. It covers which AI crawler hit which page, how often, what it was able to parse, and whether that visit later turned into a citation. Scrunch's crawler-layer approach sits closest to this, since AXP operates at the point where the agent requests the page. Alhena approaches the same question from the other side, measuring what the LLM produced and the session that followed. Both are useful: agent analytics tells you the bot arrived, answer-side analytics tells you what it did with what it read.
Alhena classifies incoming AI-engine traffic by referrer and UTM into per-engine buckets, then joins those sessions to checkout and cart events and benchmarks the result against your sitewide baseline. Because Alhena also runs a first-party on-site shopping and support agent, the visibility data and the purchase data live in one system. This lets it report not just whether an engine mentioned you, but whether that mention led to a sale. Attribution is not the same as proven incremental lift, which Alhena does not claim.
Alhena offers a free tier, a lite entry point rather than a countdown, then paid plans from $199 per month on Essentials. Scrunch offers a 7-day free trial of its Starter plan with no credit card, then $250 per month billed annually, or $300 month-to-month. The practical difference is that a free tier lets you keep a lightweight AI search monitoring habit running indefinitely, while a free trial forces the buying decision inside a week. If you take the free trial, spend it on a live prompt set from your own category rather than the generic industry prompts loaded by default.
Four steps, repeated monthly. First, review your AI prompt set and add the new questions real shoppers are asking, since prompts drift faster than keywords. Second, check competitor tracking for prompts where a rival is recommended and you are absent, which is the most actionable gap in any report. Third, ship the content fixes the platform generated, usually FAQ and product-detail-page changes. Fourth, look at whether AI-referred sessions moved and, for e-commerce, whether they converted. That workflow takes a few hours a month once it is set up, and it runs on the same rhythm your team already uses for SEO rank tracking. AI best practices here are still forming, so document what you changed and when.
Start with competitor auto-discovery rather than a list you wrote yourself. The brands winning your prompts are frequently not the competitors on your internal battlecard, because an AI model ranks by how well a page answers the question, not by market share. Alhena's Competitors tab surfaces every brand in your answer set and shows the prompts where a rival is top-ranked and you are not. Scrunch handles competitor benchmarking at the brand and page level with persona segmentation. Either way, competitor tracking in AI search should be prompt-level rather than domain-level, because you can lose a single high-intent prompt while your overall visibility still looks healthy.
Neither positions sentiment analysis as a headline capability in its public documentation as of July 2026. Both track presence, citations, and competitive share of voice, which answers whether you appear and where you rank. Sentiment analysis, meaning whether an AI-generated response describes your brand favourably or unfavourably, is a separate question. If sentiment analysis is a hard requirement, raise it in the demo and ask to see it running on your own prompts rather than on a sample account.
