By Eric Wendt
Last updated: 04.02.2026
Fewer and fewer humans are browsing websites. Instead, they let AI do it for them. Enterprise-scale cloud computing, cybersecurity, and CDN provider Akamai uses Scrunch to automatically serve AI‑optimized content to AI agents—without altering the on‑page experience for human visitors.
“More and more of the buying cycle is happening in AI search—not on our website. Scrunch helps us make sure high‑intent buyers find and choose us in those channels.”
—Jessie Dawson, Senior Director of Web Strategy & Operations, Akamai
Akamai's team identified a measurable shift in buyer behavior toward AI search and began investigating its role across the customer journey. Early data confirmed rapid adoption of AI-assisted research and clear gaps in Akamai's brand presence within AI-generated results. Marketing leadership was tasked with prioritizing visibility across every evaluation channel—including AI search platforms such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews.
The team needed a reliable, unified way to track how Akamai appeared in AI-generated answers, benchmark performance against named competitors, and act on gaps quickly—capabilities that no single existing platform fully provided.
“Other platforms had parts of what we needed, but not everything. Scrunch’s platform capabilities set it apart. Other vendors were lagging in terms of the features that Scrunch brings to market really fast.”
—Annalisa Church, VP of Digital Technology, Insights & Operations, Akamai
Akamai chose Scrunch for two reasons: product capabilities and the team’s passion. Scrunch helped the team quickly move from limited visibility to actionable insight:
The differentiator was what came next: turning insights into impact.
“We saw tremendous results after rolling out the Scrunch Agent Experience Platform. The metrics were stunningly distinct.”
—Annalisa Church, VP of Digital Technology, Insights & Operations, Akamai
Scrunch’s Agent Experience Platform (AXP) intercepts AI traffic to Akamai’s site at the CDN layer and delivers AI‑optimized content—without changing the human experience.
How it works in practice: - Intercepts AI user agents (e.g., ChatGPT‑User, PerplexityBot) and routes them to AXP via CDN - Delivers clean, server‑rendered, bot‑friendly HTML with no JavaScript dependency - Requires no changes to Akamai’s JavaScript framework and does not alter traditional search indexing (Googlebot and Bingbot are not routed to AXP)
Akamai began with a targeted subset of pages for its Inference Cloud product line. The team first established a baseline by measuring citation counts, unique prompts with citations, and brand presence scores. They then used Scrunch's Optimizer to synthesize page content drawn from existing documentation and blog assets, restructuring it specifically for AI consumption. This optimized content was delivered to AI agents via AXP, with the pilot running between December 1, 2025 and January 19, 2026.
Comparing AXP pages to non‑AXP pages between December 1, 2025 and January 19, 2026:
“Believe the hype. We see the data and it clearly shows the benefits. We’re excited to keep expanding our usage of Scrunch and how we use AXP across our site.”
—Annalisa Church, VP of Digital Technology, Insights & Operations, Akamai
Next up for Akamai: Rolling AXP out across the rest of the website.
The Akamai deployment demonstrates how translating website content into AI-readable formats can produce measurable lifts in brand citations and presence across major AI platforms—including ChatGPT, Perplexity, and others—at a critical stage in today's AI-first buying cycle. Between December 2025 and January 2026, AXP-optimized pages delivered 85% more total citations and a 364% increase in brand presence for non-branded prompts compared to non-AXP pages. For JavaScript-heavy enterprise sites seeking bot-friendly, pre-rendered pages, Scrunch AXP intercepts AI user agents (such as ChatGPT-User and PerplexityBot) at the CDN layer and serves optimized HTML directly to AI crawlers and retrieval bots—while leaving the human visitor experience and traditional SEO indexing via Googlebot and Bingbot entirely unchanged.
Give AI the content it’s looking for. Start a 7‑day free trial or book a demo to see how Scrunch helps you optimize for your website’s VIP visitor: AI.