AI search optimization — also called GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) or AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) — is as much a technical challenge as it is a creative one. Next‑gen headless CMS Strapi, trusted by over 100,000 developers and businesses worldwide, uses Scrunch to tackle both.
“People are doing more research in an LLM than on your website. Scrunch gives us visibility into how we’re showing up there and insights into how we can show up better.” — Victor Coisne, Vice President of Marketing, Strapi
As VP of Marketing at developer‑focused headless CMS Strapi — an open‑source platform with more than 60,000 GitHub stars and a community of over 100,000 users — Victor Coisne has long relied on SEO as a key acquisition channel. His approach included technical infrastructure optimization and programmatic content targeting long‑tail keywords across dozens of topic clusters.
Then ChatGPT launched in late 2022, and the landscape shifted. Traffic arriving via LLMs began climbing month over month. Session times fell and pages‑per‑session dropped, but high‑intent actions — free trial sign‑ups, purchases, and "contact sales" form completions — happened faster and at a higher rate than through traditional organic search.
Victor's diagnosis: prospective customers were researching headless CMS options inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, and similar AI assistants before ever visiting Strapi.io. By the time they arrived on the site, the shortlist was already formed. That insight prompted a new strategic focus: GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) — ensuring Strapi appears prominently in AI‑generated answers, not just on page one of Google.
That’s where GrowthX and Scrunch come in—the agency partner and the platform Strapi uses to uncover actionable insights for AI search.
“AI search is a game of figuring out how to prioritize what will have the biggest impact. Scrunch gives us the insights we need to do just that.” — Victor Coisne, Vice President of Marketing, Strapi
Strapi's GEO program — run in partnership with growth agency GrowthX — falls into three distinct workstreams, each supported by Scrunch's platform.
Victor and GrowthX use Scrunch to track Strapi’s brand presence across multiple AI platforms and benchmark against competitors. They can drill down by topic and prompt to see exactly how brands are mentioned and positioned in answers. Scrunch flags responses that mention competitors but not Strapi—instantly surfacing gaps to close. Explore these capabilities in Monitoring & Insights.
AI Search Trends in Scrunch shows which business‑relevant topics have the most search volume, how they’re trending, and where Strapi currently appears. That clarity helps the team pick the highest‑leverage prompts to optimize first.
Scrunch audits Strapi’s site for issues that can block AI citations—access controls, delivery or formatting problems—and recommends improvements like metadata updates, content gap fills, and relevance boosts to make pages more likely to be cited.
“From the topics people are searching to the prompts we should be optimizing for to making metadata updates, we want to know where the opportunities are to move the needle. That’s where Scrunch comes into play.” — Victor Coisne, Vice President of Marketing, Strapi
With Scrunch, Strapi and GrowthX achieved measurable GEO results within a single quarter:
The downstream impact: more visitors arriving already primed to buy, having completed their research inside an LLM before reaching Strapi's site — compressing the sales cycle and lifting conversion rates on high‑intent actions.
The added benefit for Victor is having a partner and a platform he trusts to navigate the fast‑moving AI search landscape.
“The space is so new and fragmented. Everything’s moving quickly. We really look to Scrunch to educate us on what we should be paying attention to.” — Victor Coisne, Vice President of Marketing, Strapi
You can spin this up quickly: