The pressure to win AI visibility is on. So is the pressure to build the skills to do it.

Our survey of 600-plus marketing and PR professionals found that 87% of respondents are feeling more pressure to develop new skills in the AI era, specifically technical ones to complement editorial and strategic capabilities.

The catch is that 58% say their training and education aren’t keeping up.

Smart companies are taking steps to fix that.

Here’s what organizations are doing to pull ahead, and how your org can follow suit.

Pick the right tool, not just another tool

Our survey found that 46% of marketing and PR professionals say their companies are planning to increase AI visibility monitoring technology investments.

That’s the right move, and the data proves it out: Teams using a dedicated AI search tool outperformed on 25 of the 26 optimization tactics we measured as part of our survey.

The keyword, though, is “dedicated.”

Lots of teams are using frankensteined tooling that’s been bolted on to legacy SEO or PR platforms.

Which goes some way toward explaining why 59% of survey respondents said they can’t confidently interpret the data they collect and translate it into action.

Teams need technology purpose-built for monitoring and optimizing AI visibility, not an AI tab welded onto a platform designed for something else.

How it works in Scrunch

• Explorer: Scrunch lets you ask and answer any question about your AI search performance, build bespoke data visualizations, and easily share reporting with different stakeholders via our self-serve analytics surface.
• Shopping: Scrunch shows you how your products show up in AI answers, so you can track performance at the product and retailer level, not just the brand level.
• Trends: Scrunch shows you emerging AI search patterns and behaviors in your category, so you can spot the topics and prompts heating up before your competitors do.
• Agent Traffic: Scrunch shows you AI agent traffic over time, traffic distribution (i.e., the type of bot), the most active agents on your site, which webpages are accessed most by retrieval agents, and a chronological log of recent bot requests.
• AI Referrals: Scrunch shows you every view and session on your website that originated from an AI platform, as well as the source, which URLs AI is driving traffic to, attributable transactions and purchase revenue, and how it all changes over time.

Enablement is how teams meet their mandates

Our survey found that:

• 44% of respondents say they’re planning to develop or formalize internal AI visibility standards, guidelines, or playbooks.
• 43% say they’re planning to upskill existing employees.

Getting teams aligned on internal KPIs, how to interpret reporting, and what actually works for improving AI visibility is foundational.

As is making sure higher-ups are measuring performance using the right metrics (62% of survey respondents say non-marketing or communications leaders still evaluate their team’s performance primarily through traditional SEO metrics or web traffic).

That said, there are other key levers orgs can pull to better enable employees.

One is using AI to optimize for AI. Connecting tooling and data to AI assistants allows employees to ask questions, get answers, and diagnose issues conversationally versus pointing and clicking across dashboards.

Another is automating key workflows, such as spotting meaningful shifts in AI search data, auditing webpages for technical and editorial issues, and serving optimized content to verified AI agents when they visit your site.

How it works in Scrunch

• Scrunchie/Scrunch MCP: Scrunch lets you analyze your AI search data in plain language using our in-app AI chatbot or MCP. Create custom data visualizations, dig into the why behind a number, and pull reporting without any searching or clicking.
• Signals: Scrunch shows you meaningful changes in your AI search data, along with next steps and AI-assisted diagnostics. Automatically flag the shifts worth knowing about, see why they matter, get told what to do about them, and instantly investigate them with AI.
• Site Optimization: Scrunch shows you a domain- and page-level breakdown of your website’s performance in AI search alongside prioritized recommendations for how to improve content consideration and selection. Get a list of the technical and editorial issues you need to fix, all ranked by impact, mapped to specific URLs, and summarized in detail by an always-on predictive model. Review and approve suggestions for each page in bulk or one by one, or set up auto-approval to ship changes automatically.
• Agent Pages: Scrunch lets you transform your entire AI-facing website into token-light, JavaScript-free HTML without changing the human-facing experience in any way. Automatically remove unnecessary code and fix common technical issues. Combine with Site Optimization to continually update site content based on content restructuring and enrichment recommendations week over week.
• Knowledge Studio: Scrunch lets you connect the knowledge trapped in your internal systems to your AI program, so teams can flag inconsistencies and AI agents can access, read, and parse up-to-date brand messaging.

Hire or partner, just equip teams to win

Our survey found that:

• 40% of respondents say they plan to hire new team members with AI visibility expertise.
• 33% say they plan to bring in outside agency support for GEO efforts.

Bringing dedicated help on board, in-house or external, is worthwhile. But only if the people who own the work get the time and tooling required to do it.

A new hire without the right tooling is a new hire fighting the same uphill battle as everyone else.

And if you go the agency route, take it from one of our own partners: Agree upfront on what's being tracked, what's being acted on, and how you'll measure ROI.

That gives a roadmap to both you and your agency.

How it works in Scrunch

• Agency Partner Program: Scrunch gives agencies what they need to build and scale an AI search practice, including prospecting licenses to spin up client pitch environments, white-labeled reporting, and other agency-specific benefits.

Close the gap before competitors do

Awareness of AI search isn’t the advantage. Capability is.

Don't just buy any tool, buy one built for the job at hand.

Don't just hand your team a mandate, enable them to execute.

And don't just bring in support, set operators up for real success.

Scrunch is designed to help with all of the above.

Want to go deeper? Read the full survey report or check out our AI search guide.

Get started with Scrunch

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