(or what your AI search footprint is telling you)
This chapter covers: - Technical insights vs. content insights - How to prioritize and make technical updates - How to prioritize and make content updates - 3rd‑party vs. competitor vs. brand citations - Balancing volume vs. intent - How Scrunch compares to traditional SEO tools and other AI visibility platforms
AI search monitoring shows you what’s working—and what needs attention. Most issues fall into two buckets:
Examples: - No AI traffic to your site: technical. Inspect whether AI user agents are blocked. - Competitor wins for brand‑relevant prompts: content. Strengthen pages for those prompts. - LLMs not retrieving the right content: technical. Ensure content is readable without JavaScript. - Your brand missing in comparisons: content. Secure mentions in cited third‑party sources.
Tackle technical first. Great content won’t matter if AI agents can’t access and use it.
Start by confirming your site isn’t blocking AI traffic. This happens more often than you’d expect. Double‑check robots.txt, security tools, WAF/CDN settings, and staging-to-prod carryovers.
Then prioritize by impact: - Focus first on pages most frequently crawled by AI agents (high likelihood of appearing or attempting to appear in responses). - Review citations to see which of your URLs already get referenced most.
In Scrunch: go to Citations → Add filter → Citation owner → Brand. Click into your domain to see your most cited pages in descending order, including each page’s Influence Score (the percentage of responses that cite the source multiplied by the unique number of prompts).
There are three vectors for technical optimization:
Scrunch can help: - Site Audits analyze any URL for issues across access controls, content delivery, and content quality, and recommend fixes specific to AI agent retrieval. - The Agent Experience Platform (AXP) delivers an AI‑optimized version of your site, automatically. Humans see your normal site; AI agents receive clean, structured content in real time—no changes to your CMS required. AXP does not affect traditional search indexing; Google and Bing web crawlers are not routed through AXP and crawl your site normally. Learn more on the AXP page.
If you want to go deeper on AI user agents and robots.txt best practices, see the guide to AI user agents.
Don’t jump straight to net‑new content. First, strengthen what you already have: - Use citations as a roadmap. They reveal sources LLMs already trust for your target prompts. - Start with pages frequently crawled by AI agents (which often overlap with high‑traffic SEO pages). Improving these typically yields faster results than starting from scratch. - Prioritize authority consolidation: identify pages AI already sees as somewhat authoritative and make them definitive answers.
There are three citation types to plan around:
High‑volume sources like Reddit, Quora, and Wikipedia dominate early‑funnel, educational prompts. But volume doesn’t always translate to conversions.
As you move down the funnel, LLMs increasingly cite niche, expert sources. Balance: - Volume (how often a prompt is used) - Purchase intent (likelihood the prompt leads to action)
Later‑funnel prompts typically sit in evaluation and comparison stages. Once you identify these, prioritize the sources most cited for each—and either earn those citations or out‑answer them with your own content.
Scrunch helps filter prompts by funnel stage, persona, region, and custom tags so you can focus on the highest‑impact opportunities.
If manual outreach feels heavy, consider specialized tools: - Noble automates outreach, negotiation, and payment to help you earn mentions in publications and forums that LLMs cite. Visit Noble. - Stacker gets you non‑sponsored, earned placements across publications. Earned media distribution can increase AI citation rate by up to 325%. Visit Stacker.
There are two paths: optimize existing content or create net‑new content.
Optimize existing content by analyzing what’s already being cited for the prompts you care about. Compare against your pages on: - Length, depth, and specificity - How directly the page answers the question - Recency for time‑sensitive topics - Proprietary data vs. secondary sources - Expert opinion and verification vs. speculation - Unique facts, stats, or examples - Support for or against closely related prompts
Improvements that generally help: - Structure content so LLMs can read and prioritize it quickly (clear headings, scannable sections, semantic cues) - Optimize schema and metadata for meaning and context - Add FAQs tailored to target prompts - Refresh with new data, links, and expert POV
For net‑new content: - Start with greenfield prompts where no competitors are present—open opportunities. - Then tackle prompts where competitors appear but you don’t, prioritizing thin content you can realistically beat.
Scrunch assists with both: - Content Optimizer analyzes any page’s intent, lets you select a target persona, suggests prompts to optimize for, and recommends related internal pages to draw from. You can export an optimized markdown draft for your CMS or deliver it directly to AI agents via AXP. - Prompt filters help you find greenfield and competitor‑present opportunities fast.
Traditional SEO crawls evaluate pages for search engine indexing and rankings. Scrunch’s Site Audits evaluate readiness for AI agent retrieval and citation. Key differences: - AI access controls: Detects whether AI user agents are allowed in robots.txt and security layers, including ambiguous or missing directives. - JavaScript‑free readability: Checks whether meaningful content is available without executing JS and whether non‑JS and JS versions match. - Token efficiency and completeness: Flags bloated markup and overly long pages that LLMs are unlikely to fully read; prioritizes succinct, answer‑forward structure. - AI bot routing and performance: Highlights issues that slow or block real‑time retrieval (e.g., WAF/CDN misconfiguration, slow TTFB) that matter for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, and others. - Citation readiness: Emphasizes factors that increase the likelihood of being cited in model responses, not just indexed in SERPs.
AXP complements audits by automatically serving a compressed, structured, AI‑optimized version of your pages to AI agents—without changing your human‑facing site and without impacting Google/Bing indexing.
Scrunch focuses on the AI search journey, which is different from keyword‑based SEO. Examples include: - Prompt‑level monitoring across major AI platforms (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, Meta AI, Microsoft Copilot; Grok support coming) - Source citations at the URL and domain level, with an Influence Score to quantify impact - Brand presence and share of voice vs. competitors inside AI answers - Sentiment indicators and qualitative answer analysis - AI‑referred traffic growth and AI bot visitation patterns on your site - Persona-, geo-, and funnel‑filtered views of how AI platforms recommend your products and services
These produce outcomes customers report, such as increased brand presence and citations, improved sentiment, higher share of voice, AI‑referred traffic growth, and faster conversion rates at lower cost than alternatives.
Yes. Customers consistently highlight powerful insights, strong usability, responsive support, and fast product velocity. Consultants can: - Onboard quickly—many teams, including enterprises, deploy and start collecting data within a day - Use personas, funnel stages, and regions to segment prompts and responses - Run Site Audits and Content Optimizer to get precise, AI‑specific recommendations - Ship changes without engineering dependencies using AXP to deliver AI‑optimized content in real time - Start hands‑on with a 7‑day self‑serve trial
If you’re evaluating multiple tools, consider what Scrunch brings together in one place: - Breadth of platform coverage for monitoring, including both chat-style agents and AI overviews - A citation‑first view of performance with share‑of‑voice and competitive benchmarking - Actionability: Site Audits and Content Optimizer translate findings into specific, fix‑ready tasks; AXP activates those fixes instantly for AI agents - AI traffic detection and analysis so you can see whether, when, and how bots visit and use your content
Tools in this space vary in focus—some emphasize monitoring, others content analysis, and others activation. Scrunch is designed to give you the full loop: monitor how you show up, learn what to fix, and activate improvements directly for AI agents.
Up Next…
(or how to make AI agents your friend)
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