When someone asks AI about your category, it reads a stack of sources, synthesizes them into one answer, and hands it to a buyer.

Look at the pages shaping that answer and you’ll notice something uncomfortable: Most of them aren’t yours.

We found that 58% of marketing and PR professionals don’t review which third-party sources AI systems cite most frequently in their category, and 61% aren’t working to secure brand mentions in trusted media sources.

That's a blind spot over the exact surfaces that decide most AI answers: whether they mention you at all, and whether they get you right when they do.

But there’s another, more alarming problem.

Sometimes the sources AI cites for your business-relevant prompts are impostors: Fraudulent websites engineered to look like yours while stealing your clicks (and potentially your customers' information).

We’re solving for all of it with the launch of Citation Optimization, a new feature that automatically:

• Finds the pages being cited for the prompts you’re tracking
• Tells you which sources are most influential and easiest to win
• Fact-checks brand mentions against your approved internal sources
• Identifies websites suspected of impersonating your brand and misleading consumers
• Drafts outreach you can use to secure placement in cited sources, correct factual inaccuracies, or initiate an impostor takedown

Scrunch already helps you optimize your own site for AI visibility.

Citation Optimization helps you put the pages you don’t own to work, too, and keeps your brand and customers safe in the process.

Outsource the grind, keep the gains

Getting your brand added to cited sources is straightforward with Citation Optimization: Find, target, pitch, repeat.

Find

We show you the pages that AI cites for the prompts you track, inside whatever date range you pick, grouped by either URL, domain, or topic.

Then we help you figure out which ones are worth your time.

We start by suggesting top opportunities: third-party pages that don’t name you yet and are easiest to win. Each day Scrunch picks a few pages worth pitching and tells you why.

Prefer to dive in yourself? Filter the full list however you like, from prompt to platform to page type.

Every citation comes with:

• Influence Score: How much a page actually shapes AI answers, so you’re not chasing a random blog post AI doesn’t even read.
• Winnability: How easily a page could be edited to include you on a scale of 1-5, based on who it names, what type of page it is, and when it was last updated.
• Fact checked: How the page squares with your Knowledge Studio documents, so you can easily see any brand mentions that get the facts wrong.

Click into any citation to see exactly which prompts point to it, alongside the latest AI answers.

Target

Once you add a citation to your target list, Scrunch gets to work.

You get a brief that explains why the page matters to your brand, the angle to take in your outreach, and what to say, plus a ready-to-send message drafted for the page author.

We tell you what the page says about you today, if anything, and hand you the author’s contact information pulled from the site’s public pages and profiles.

You stay updated on the status of every citation in Scrunch, from targeting to placement.

Pitch

We find the citations, identify the contacts, and draft the message for you, but nothing is sent from Scrunch.

You stay the sender. We stay the system of record.

Once you’re ready, copy-paste the message, fire it off, and mark it sent in Scrunch to track what happens after.

We read the page every week and mark it placed once the source names you. If a page drops a claim your approved facts contradict, we tell you and draft the correction for you.

Soon you’ll be able to work directly with Scrunch technology partners like Noble, Stacker, Getfluence, and CJ that can automate the process further, whether you’re securing placement in a cited source or syndicating content to create new citations of your own.

Find the fakes, fix the problem

Fact-checking isn’t the only way Scrunch helps keep your brand safe.

When building Citation Optimization, we discovered that fraudulent websites posing as real brands turn up in AI answers week after week, to the tune of one million-plus answers a year.

Roughly 3 in 4 AI answers citing a confirmed impostor treat it as the brand’s own source, and only 0.3% of answers warned the reader that the site might be fake.

Most of these impostor sites aren't on any list of known fakes, almost none appear on public threat feeds, and Google rarely ranks them on the first page.

Sites like these used to be buried in search engine results pages. Now, thanks to AI, they’re popping up in answers to common questions, from refund and cancellation queries to login, account, and support queries.

In the course of our research, we learned that about 1 in 13 Scrunch customers—and 17% or more of the Fortune 500—was impacted by impostor sites.

We shared this information with affected customers, then got to work building impostor detection and resolution into our platform.

Scrunch automatically surfaces possible impersonations for you, alongside why they look fake and the AI answers they’re appearing in.

If the website is legitimate, such as a partner, distributor, or unrelated business, you can dismiss it. But if it’s not, you can prepare a takedown with one click.

We’ll find the contact information of the relevant hosting and domain providers, draft messaging to send regarding the issue, and give you a downloadable PDF you can include that details the evidence.

Mark it as sent in Scrunch and we’ll keep you updated on the site’s status until it’s taken care of. In our experience, brands usually receive a response within 24-48 hours.

Shape the answer, onsite and off

We built our Agent Experience Platform (AXP) to help you close the loop on the site you own: See what agents consume, fix what trips them up, deliver an optimized version.

Citation Optimization helps you close the loop on the pages you don’t own.

Cover the content you control, and the content that controls your reputation in AI answers, all in one place.

Whether that means getting added to an influential source, correcting information on it, or having it removed.

Citation Optimization is included in all Enterprise plans, and available to self-serve customers with a limit of up to 10 targeted citations per month. Impersonation takedowns are free and unlimited.

Don’t just know which sources are shaping the AI answers you care about.

Know which ones are reachable, which ones are accurate, which ones are legitimate, and what to say to the people who own them.

Optimize your offsite presence with Scrunch

Secure citation placement, fix factual inaccuracies, and prevent fraudulent citations. Start a 7-day free trial or get in touch to see how Scrunch can help you take control of your citation strategy.