Sitecore acquires Scrunch for answer engine optimization

Sitecore on Wednesday acquired Scrunch, an answer engine optimization platform designed to help its customers be better recognized in AI search and summaries.

Sitecore did not divulge the financial terms of the acquisition, but Bloomberg reported it was for about $225 million. Using algorithms different from the tried-and-true marketing practice of search engine optimization (SEO), AI search agents operate on different principles to rank -- and cite -- the most authoritative web sources for their summaries.

Sitecore isn't the only company retooling its platform to accommodate AI search in the last year. Adobe added LLM Optimizer and then bought SEMrush to acquire more. HubSpot, among many others, added its own.

Martech is at a crossroads, where users will have to decide whether to use a standalone AEO tool or go with embedded tools in platforms such as Sitecore. Sitecore chief marketing officer Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek said that existing Scrunch customers will be able to use it as a standalone, and also that Scrunch-driven features will eventually be integrated into Sitecore.

Marketers will have to grapple with the question of AEO versus SEO: How to allocate finite marketing budgets to one or the other, as both will likely remain relevant for the foreseeable future. AEO -- because it puts value on earned recognition at sites like Reddit or review sites -- brings the notion of "earned media" back into marketing conversations after a decade or more of focus on the other two kinds of media, paid and owned, said Liz Miller of Constellation Research.

Marketers have preferred paid and owned media in recent years because marketing automation and analytics technologies readily measure and determine return on investment for those content categories -- and not so much for earned. But those technologies have also fragmented the work that public relations communications and marketing teams do, and they used separate tools to gauge their individual successes.

Earned media is coming back into the picture because of how AI search values authority -- and authority is earned. PR and marketing teams will have to work together on unified technology platforms, Miller predicts, and Sitecore's Scrunch acquisition may help enable that kind of collaboration needed to fuel AI search success.

"Earned becomes the wild card," Miller said. "It is a wild card that is really, really hard to control, to master and to monitor -- but it's going to be a requirement as we're looking at AEO and [generative AI optimization]."