Scrunch AI partnered with the team at Bain & Company on the research brief, “Marketing’s New Middleman: AI Agents.” The findings confirm what many marketing and digital leaders are already seeing: AI agents like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini are now a major gateway to brand discovery and decision-making—often replacing traditional search and compressing the path to purchase.
Below are the four biggest takeaways from the Bain brief, plus practical steps, tools to use, and how Scrunch helps you operationalize them.
Customers are increasingly turning to AI-powered agents to research options and get personalized recommendations—bypassing Google results, brand websites, and even sales reps. These systems don’t just read your site; they synthesize answers from third-party sources, reviews, earned media, and structured data across the web. In our analysis, more than 90% of content in responses to nonbranded queries in LLM engines comes from third-party sources.
What to do now: - Ensure your brand appears where AI models actually look: trusted third-party sites, authoritative reviews, structured resources, and your own AI-readable content. - Treat third-party visibility as table stakes for AI discovery, not an afterthought.
As Bain highlights, AI-powered “zero-click” journeys compress discovery-to-decision, reducing your opportunities to appear and influence. That compression is a risk if you’re invisible—but a win if you’re discoverable. In our analysis, conversion rates can be 2x that of standard Google search for certain journeys.
What to do now: - Plan for three paths in your growth model: direct visits, AI-driven journeys, and traditional channels. - Build a unified content and visibility strategy that earns citations, not just clicks.
Old SEO KPIs don’t tell you whether agents actually recommend you. You need to know how often you’re cited, where you’re positioned in responses, and how that exposure changes over time.
What to do now: - Track citations like the new backlinks. Measure mentions, where they link, sentiment, and whether they drive qualified sessions and leads. - Benchmark competitor presence and share-of-voice inside AI responses across multiple platforms.
How Scrunch measures this today: - Aggregate visibility across platforms: competitive presence by percentage over time, your brand’s presence by percentage, and share of citations by source over time. - Response-level details: whether your brand is mentioned, where it appears in the answer, sentiment of the response, whether your site is cited, and which competitors are mentioned. - New prompt collection and refresh: prompts are collected daily for 14 days, then on a default 72-hour refresh, with on-demand “New Response” refreshes anytime.
Agents optimize for utility and fast, direct answers. They “scan, parse, and summarize”—not browse. If your content isn’t AI-readable and citation-ready, you can be overlooked even if your insights are great.
What to do now: - Make content scannable: clear language, bullet points, FAQs, and schema where appropriate. - Structure pages around specific, high-intent questions agents are asked—and provide concise, quotable answers with authoritative sources. - Remove technical blockers: ensure critical information (pricing, features, FAQs) renders as plain, lightweight HTML that agents can parse without JavaScript.
Marketers don’t need a whole new martech stack—just the right tools for how discovery works now.
For deeper context on the shift to AI-first discovery, see our perspective on why your most important site visitor is no longer human.
Most analytics focus on rankings, backlinks, or clicks. Scrunch measures what AI agents actually return: - Cross-agent brand and competitor presence by percentage across platforms. - Positions within answers, response sentiment, and complete citation graphs. - Agent-specific signals like agent visits and referrals, so you can connect AI visibility to qualified sessions and conversions. - A validation loop that compares results against live answers using browser automation and official APIs, plus rapid refresh cycles to keep pace with changing models.
Yes. Scrunch was built with agencies and practitioners in mind: - Straightforward workflows for converting keyword sets into buyer prompts, bulk prompt uploads, and robust filtering. - Pitch-ready dashboards, shareable insights, and persona-based reporting clients can understand. - Optional partner support and best practices through our Agency Partner Program to help you operationalize AI Search as an ongoing discipline. Learn more on our Agencies page.
Pros: - Purpose-built metrics for AI discovery: citations, presence, position, sentiment, and cross-platform share-of-voice. - Agent-aware content delivery with AXP to increase citation-readiness without disrupting your human UX. - Persona-level analysis to see how visibility differs by audience and geography. - Flexible, validated data collection across major AI platforms; fast refresh with on-demand updates. - Strong data protections; no external model training on your data.
Cons: - AI platforms evolve quickly; maintaining visibility requires ongoing monitoring and iteration. - Coverage prioritizes major AI platforms; support for some emerging assistants may roll out over time. - Large prompt sets may take longer to collect and refresh. - Scrunch is not a content generation tool; you’ll still need content and web teams to implement recommendations.
Explore the Bain brief to understand the broader market shift: Marketing’s New Middleman: AI Agents. If you want to see how your brand currently appears inside AI—and what to fix first—book a meeting with our team or start a 7-day free trial.