Fewer and fewer human beings are browsing websites. Instead, they let AI do it for them.
Enterprise-scale cloud computing, cybersecurity, and content delivery network (CDN) provider Akamai uses Scrunch to automatically serve AI-optimized content to AI agents without altering the on-page experience for human web 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
The rules of search have changed
Akamai was laser-focused on SEO—and all the technical, measurement, and content creation work that comes with it—to reach buyers in cloud computing, web operations, and cybersecurity.
But seeing the shift in buyer behavior, Senior Director of Web Strategy & Operations Jessie Dawson and Vice President of Digital Technology, Insights, & Operations Annalisa Church started investigating the emerging role of AI search in the customer journey.
Their internal review of preliminary consumer data confirmed the rapid popularity of AI search and highlighted key opportunities for Akamai’s brand presence.
CMO Kim Salem-Jackson gave the marketing team a new strategic imperative: Prioritize visibility in all the channels where Akamai’s customers discover, evaluate, and compare solutions, including AI search.
The hunt for a reliable way to track how Akamai was showing up in AI search results, how it stacked up against competitors, and how to improve performance was on.
“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
Scrunch brought the product—and the passion
Akamai evaluated multiple vendors. It went with Scrunch for two reasons:
- The product capabilities
- The passion of the team
Scrunch didn’t just help Akamai start monitoring its AI search presence—it helped the team understand what it should be measuring in the first place, what to prioritize, and where to go next.
The team quickly went from little-to-no visibility to:
- Prompt monitoring: Tracking brand mentions, placements, and sentiment across business-critical prompts
- Citation tracking: Seeing which sources influence AI answers most to inform content creation and placement outreach
- Competitive benchmarking: Knowing exactly how Akamai stacks up to its top competitors across topics, prompts, and citations
- Granular measurement: Measuring AI search performance across in-depth dimensions like persona, funnel stage, geography, AI model, custom tag, and more
- Agent traffic analysis: Viewing which AI bots are visiting individual pages on its site most frequently for training, indexing, and retrieval purposes
- Search trend surveillance: Learning which topics are most searched across AI platforms to inform prompt tracking and content creation
But the biggest differentiator was in what came next: taking action on AI search insights.
“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
Serve AI what it wants to see
Scrunch’s Agent Experience Platform (AXP) works by intercepting AI traffic to Akamai’s website via CDN (it just so happens that Akamai offers an industry-leading CDN of its own).
AXP automatically strips away unnecessary code that AI doesn’t value and restructures webpages into AI-friendly formats. Content is compressed and optimized for AI without changing the human-facing website in any way.
Akamai kicked off its AXP implementation by focusing on a subset of webpages related to its new Inference Cloud product.
First it measured existing content performance to compare post-AXP performance across the same prompts.
Using Scrunch’s Optimizer feature, page content was optimized by pulling from relevant documentation and blog posts on the Akamai website, synthesized specifically for AI consumption, and delivered directly to agents via AXP.
The results (comparing AXP pages to non-AXP pages between December 1, 2025 and January 19, 2026) were clear:
- 85% more total citations: AXP pages were cited more frequently
- 38% more unique prompts with citations: AXP pages were cited in response to a broader set of prompts
In terms of citations, AXP pages are outperforming non-AXP pages by 22% since launch.
Meanwhile, results for brand presence were significant: AXP pages resulted in a 364% increase in brand presence for associated non-branded prompts.
That represents nearly 5x growth in brand presence. In ChatGPT alone, Akamai’s brand presence versus competitors for those prompts increased by 133%.
Next up for Akamai? Rolling AXP out across the rest of its website.
“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
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