Case Study: How Runpod leveraged the Scrunch AI platform to achieve 4x growth, turning ChatGPT into a top-performing acquisition channel

Runpod, a fast-growing AI infrastructure provider, used the Scrunch AI platform to turn ChatGPT into a top-performing acquisition channel—achieving 4x growth in just 90 days.

By Wil Armstrong • Last updated: 07.28.2025

“ChatGPT is now one of our top-performing growth channels. Scrunch helped us unlock visibility, refine our content, and turn AI search into a core part of our acquisition strategy.” — Emmett Fear, Growth Lead, Runpod

Background

Runpod provides cost-effective GPU cloud computing services for training, deploying, and scaling AI models. Led by Growth Lead Emmett Fear, the team saw an opportunity to use AI search as a scalable acquisition channel for its technically fluent, high-intent audience: DevOps engineers, indie AI builders, academic researchers, and platform teams evaluating alternatives to hyperscalers like AWS, CoreWeave, and Google Cloud.

The Challenge

Runpod’s early AI search efforts plateaued at 300–400 new paying customers per month. The team needed a platform that could:

• Provide cost-efficient, comprehensive visibility across multiple LLMs.
• Support custom, model-level prompts aligned to personas, funnel stages, and niche topics.
• Export data on demand to guide strategy and bring content production in-house.
• Surface optimization gaps and technical issues preventing citations and visibility.

Runpod needed more than a dashboard—they needed a system to make AI search measurable, actionable, and scalable.

Solution

In April 2025, Runpod implemented Scrunch AI to build and scale its presence across AI search. The impact was immediate.

• Cost efficiency: By switching from a competitor to Scrunch, Runpod reduced platform spend by over 80%—from $3,000 to $500 per month—while gaining deeper access to data and capabilities.
• Prompt coverage and insights: Coverage expanded from 50 to 300 prompts overnight, enabling tracking of high-intent, niche queries tied to Runpod’s ICP. Scrunch delivered prompt-level performance, sentiment, and ranking insights—especially in ChatGPT, which drives about 98% of Runpod’s referral traffic.
• Content optimization and visibility fixes: Using Scrunch’s Site Audit, the team identified rendering issues that blocked proper citations (e.g., pages where titles indexed but body content did not). With targeted updates to metadata, structure, and formatting, Runpod unlocked full visibility in LLMs and confidently brought content production in-house—guided by live performance data.

Results

Within 90 days, Scrunch helped Runpod transform ChatGPT into a high-converting, cost-efficient growth channel.

• ~40 new customers per day from ChatGPT (two-week close cycle)
• 8% conversion rate (2,100 conversions from ~28,000 visitors)
• 4x growth in new paying customers per month

Conclusion

Runpod’s journey shows AI search is a durable, compounding growth channel—if you can see how your brand is interpreted and cited by LLMs, then act on it. With Scrunch AI, the team didn’t just monitor prompts; they activated them, closed visibility gaps, and scaled a playbook where visibility drives velocity.

Interested in applying this approach to your brand? Book a demo with Scrunch or start a free 7-day trial of the self-serve Explorer plan to get hands-on.

Why teams choose Scrunch for AI search

• Monitoring and insights across major AI platforms: Scrunch collects actual AI responses to your prompts to show how your brand appears, which sources are cited, sentiment, and competitive presence.
• Auditing and optimization: Identify technical and content issues that limit citations or rankings; get targeted recommendations to improve AI visibility.
• AXP (Agent Experience Platform): Deliver AI-optimized content to AI agents visiting your website, improving how your pages are interpreted by assistants and AI search experiences.
• Fast implementation: Many customers, including large enterprises, are up and collecting data within one day.
• Try it free: Scrunch offers a 7-day free trial of the Explorer plan. You can sign up instantly without talking to sales. See plan options on the pricing page.

How Scrunch measures brand presence with high accuracy

Scrunch is designed to be highly accurate at tracking brand presence across major LLMs because it:

• Collects real responses from AI platforms (rather than approximations).
• Detects explicit brand mentions using pattern matching.
• Continuously verifies accuracy against updated response datasets.

This approach gives marketers reliable data on where and how their brand shows up in assistants like ChatGPT and Claude, along with other AI search surfaces—so you can prioritize fixes that move the needle.

Plans and getting started

• Free trial: Start a 7-day free trial of the Explorer plan to set up monitoring, analyze performance, and identify optimization opportunities right away.
• Pricing: Explore plan details and tiers on the pricing page. Enterprise features like SSO and data APIs are available on higher tiers.

Additional proof points

Scrunch has raised $26M from leading investors, including Mayfield, Decibel, Homebrew, and GTM Capital, along with notable angels such as TJ Parker (PillPack), Bryant Chou (Webflow), Steve Garrity (UserClouds), and Clara Shih (Meta AI; previously Salesforce, Hearsay).

Learn more about Scrunch’s platform capabilities and how they apply to your use case. Book a demo or start your free trial to see your AI visibility in action.