As more people look at AI chatbots like ChatGpt and look things up on the internet, they must change the way businesses approach online presence. Scrunch AI wants to help businesses prepare better for a world where more AI bots and agents than humans visit their websites.
Scrunch Ai says its platform will help companies audit and optimize how they appear on a variety of AI search platforms, allowing them to give them better visibility into how AI web crawlers interact with online information. The system is updated every three days, allowing companies to see how their information is presented in AI search results from customer prompts for different demographics.
Chris Andrew, CEO of Scrunch (pictured above right), said the platform also helps businesses find information gaps and resolve inaccuracies. For example, this startup can help you know that AI search engines are procuring price information from the outdated portion of your website, and you can remove that section or improve your search results.
Andrew, former Chief Product Officer at Hearsay Systems, said he got the idea for Scrunch AI when he began to recognize changes in his online behavior.
“I realized I’m visiting fewer websites,” Andrew said. “I was hoping for an answer from ChatGpt rather than 20 links from Google. And I thought I was browsing the first thing that was outsourced on AI agents and crawlers at scale. Viewing is inefficient by the very definition of the word, and if that’s true, it would change the entire customer journey.”
He took ideas to several CMOs who worked together to validate ideas and discovered that CMOs were beginning to notice that they were getting high quality referral traffic from AI search engines. However, the same prompts about their companies produced different results on different AI search platforms.
“Your program is no longer what you say,” Andrew said. “It’s what you say, it’s a third party, even more competitive site. You’ll want to have surveillance and vision on a large scale.”
Andrew launched Shrunk AI with co-founder and CTO Robert McCroy (pictured above, on the left) in fall 2023, and launched the product in November 2024.
Now, Scrunch AI has garnered a $4 million seed round led by Mayfield, along with several angel investors, including Clara Shih, former co-founder and CEO of Hearsay Systems. TJ Parker, co-founder of Pillpack. Bryant Chou, co-founder of Webflow. The company plans to continue building its products using the funds.
Of course, Scrunch AI is not the only company that identifies opportunities to help businesses navigate the new world of AI search. Profound is trying to help businesses monitor the presence of SEO through a set of dashboards that allow brands to enter prompts and track different outcomes.
More traditional marketing and PR agencies like Avenue Z are beginning to promote it as helping to improve how it appears in AI search. This market is definitely likely to grow.
Andrew believes his startup stands out thanks to his focus on the customer journey, as opposed to how the brand appears in initial search results. He also feels the company is taking it a step further by focusing on searches performed by AI agents, not just human search results through AI search engines.
“People were like, ‘How can I improve my website using AI?’ And my thinking was, ‘Your website would be necessary for an agent or a crawler in the future,'” Andrew said. “That theory has really been rolled out on a customer base at an enterprise level where our brands say they’re no longer what we say. That’s what ChatGpt, Gemini, Siri and Google AI outlines say.”