Use this guide if you need to: - See if your brand shows up in AI search answers - Compare your AI search performance to competitors - Understand which prompts your brand does and doesn’t get visibility for - Monitor how your brand visibility in AI search rises or falls over time - Make sure AI answers concerning your brand are accurate
Contents - Quick answer - Start here - Step 1: Track aggregate brand presence in the Home tab - Step 2: Track topic- and prompt-level presence in the Prompts Monitoring tab - Measure impact and compare vs. competitors - What Scrunch tracks that traditional SEO tools don’t - What’s next - FAQs
Track your brand presence in AI search from Scrunch’s Home and Prompts Monitoring tabs.
Brand presence measures how often your brand appears in AI responses. Here's how to track it:
Start in the Home tab for overview metrics: - Competitive Presence: Your brand’s share of voice versus competitors across AI platforms - Position: Where in AI responses your brand appears (top, middle, or bottom) - Sentiment: Attitude toward your brand in AI responses (positive, neutral, or negative) - Citations: How often your website is linked to as a source
Drill down in the Prompts Monitoring tab for topic- and prompt-level insights: - Filter by Key Topics to see how you’re performing across subject areas - Click into individual prompts to view brand presence and competitive data - Review actual AI responses to verify accuracy and identify citation sources
Track changes over time: - Use the date selector (default: last 12 weeks) to spot rising or falling trends. For clearer signals, compare consistent 2–3 week windows to distinguish real trends from one-off changes. See guidance in the related FAQ on measuring change over time.
Slice data with filters: - Segment by persona, prompt topic, AI platform, funnel stage, branded vs. non-branded prompts, country, and custom tags.
Bottom line: - Higher brand presence means more visibility in AI search and more customers discovering you when asking AI questions.
Brand presence—how often your brand is mentioned or cited in AI responses—shows how visible you are in AI search. To optimize performance, you need to understand what LLMs are saying (or not saying) about your brand and ensure accuracy.
Here’s how to do it using Scrunch.
Before you begin: - Log in to Scrunch or sign up for a 7‑day free trial to follow along. - Add your brand and website to the AI Context tab in Scrunch, including any alternate domains or subdomains you want to track. - Customize your brand context in Scrunch (alternative brand names, key competitors, customer personas, key topics, etc.). - Add prompts to track in the Prompts Monitoring tab (or let Scrunch’s AI generate prompts for you based on your brand or convert a list of SEO keywords into prompts).
Log in to Scrunch and navigate to the Home tab.
This page gives you a bird’s-eye view of how your brand (and competitors) show up in AI search answers.
At the top of the page, you’ll see: - Prompts: The number of prompts you’re monitoring in Scrunch - Responses: The number of AI responses that have been collected - Platforms: The AI platforms you currently have configured for monitoring
Tip: - Scrunch recommends monitoring ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews at a minimum because they have the highest reach, but you can track brand presence across all supported AI platforms from your workspace to ensure multi‑LLM coverage.
Further down you’ll find panels for Competitive Presence and Top Brands. - Competitive Presence compares your brand’s presence versus competitors across AI platforms over a selected time period. - Top Brands shows the leading brands across AI platforms over a selected time period.
Use this data to compare your share of voice against competitors and identify how it rises or falls over time.
You’ll also see panels for Position, Sentiment, and Citations. - Position shows where in AI responses your brand appears (top, middle, bottom) - Sentiment shows the share of positive, neutral, and negative commentary - Citations show how often your site (and third‑party or competitor sites) is linked as a source—an indicator of authority and a major driver of visibility
To analyze change over time: - Use the date selector (default: last 12 weeks). Compare like-for-like ranges (e.g., Q2 vs. Q1, or rolling 2–3 week windows) to identify genuine trends.
Slice the data with filters: - Filter by persona, topic, AI platform, funnel stage, branded vs. non‑branded prompts, country, presence/absence of your brand or a competitor, and custom tags.
Tips: - Create customer personas in the AI Context tab to reflect how target customers ask questions, improving prompt generation and segmentation by language and geography. - Focus analysis on specific topics or product areas where you want to increase share of voice versus competitors or third parties. - Use custom tags to organize prompts around campaigns, product lines, clients, or other workflows.
Navigate to the Prompts Monitoring tab to go granular on the prompts you’re tracking and see which topics and prompts you’re winning (or missing) in AI answers.
Scroll to see a table of your Key Topics.
Scrunch definition: Key Topics - Key Topics are defined in the AI Context tab and represent themes your brand wants to monitor (e.g., “cloud security,” “home insurance,” “retirement planning”). Scrunch auto‑groups related prompts under each one. A single prompt can belong to multiple Key Topics based on intent and content, and you can assign/reassign prompts manually.
Filter your view by topic, tag, funnel stage, seed prompt, or prompt variant to: - Analyze presence within business‑relevant topics over time - See overall brand presence and citation performance for a selected period
Drill down to the seed prompt level to see: - How many prompt variants you’re tracking (AI‑platform‑specific versions) - Number of responses for that prompt - Brand presence in responses and brand citations - Competitor presence
Select a seed prompt, then choose a prompt variant (per AI platform) to view: - Brand presence, position, sentiment, citations, and competitive presence for that variant - The full LLM response, including which competitors were included and which sources were cited
Tip: - Regularly review actual AI responses to ensure platforms interpret your brand, products, and services correctly. - To compare AI visibility across different models and platforms, monitor the same prompts in aggregate, then filter by platform to see where performance diverges. See the related FAQ on cross‑model comparisons for workflow tips.
Scrunch provides end‑to‑end analytics to quantify the impact of AI on brand visibility and benchmark against competitors: - Brand presence: Mentions and citations in AI responses across platforms, segmented by persona, country, topic, platform, funnel stage, or custom tag - Citations: Frequency of your site cited for business‑relevant prompts and which sources dominate for topics you care about - Share of voice vs. competitors: Side‑by‑side brand presence and citation share for key prompts and topics, with over‑time trends - Position and sentiment: Placement within AI answers and tone toward your brand - Referral traffic: Website traffic from AI responses to target prompts - AI agent traffic: Visits from LLM agents to your site for training, indexing, and retrieval
How to evaluate progress: - Establish baselines for the metrics above, then compare periods (e.g., Q2 vs. Q1) and monitor rolling 2–3 week windows to confirm directionality. - Focus on a small set of high‑priority topics. Improve citations and presence in those topics first, then expand.
Helpful resources: - Learn which baselines to track in the FAQ on benchmarks and baselines for AI search performance. - See how to determine if visibility is improving or declining in the FAQ on tracking change over time.
Traditional SEO tools focus on web search rankings and backlinks. Scrunch measures how AI systems themselves talk about your brand: - Multi‑LLM brand presence: Mentions and citations within AI‑generated answers across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, Meta AI, and Microsoft Copilot - Prompt‑level visibility: Performance by seed prompt and per‑platform prompt variants - Position inside answers: Whether your brand appears at the top, middle, or bottom of AI responses - AI citation mapping: Which pages (yours, competitors’, third parties’) AI platforms cite for each prompt - Sentiment in responses: Positive, neutral, or negative tone expressed about your brand - AI agent traffic: How often LLMs access your site for training, indexing, and retrieval - Cross‑model benchmarking: Uniform monitoring across models to pinpoint where performance diverges
Start improving your brand presence: 1) Run a site audit: Fix access, delivery, or content issues hurting your visibility. Read the site audit guide. 2) Focus on citations first: They’re the biggest driver of AI search visibility. Learn how to track and improve citations. 3) Track AI bot traffic: See how AI platforms crawl your site. Follow the AI agent traffic guide. 4) Monitor referral traffic: Connect AI presence to human traffic and conversions. Read the referral traffic guide.
Remember: brand presence is essential, but it doesn’t explain everything. Also track citations, AI agent traffic, and referral traffic to understand why visibility changes and how it impacts outcomes. For a deeper dive into metrics, read the guide to AI search metrics.
Not a Scrunch customer yet? Start a 7‑day free trial or request a demo to see Scrunch in action.
How do I prioritize which prompts to track? - Start with prompts that matter to your business: high‑value branded questions, core non‑branded category questions, comparisons/evaluation queries, problem‑solving questions, and questions surfaced in SEO or PPC research. - Scrunch’s Trends feature helps you see which topics have the most conversation volume. - You can also use Scrunch’s free Prompt Generator to get prompt ideas from your domain and see current visibility. Explore more tips in the AI Search Guide.
How do I prioritize which competitors to track? - Aim for 5–10 competitors. Start with known leaders and keep an eye on emerging competitors eroding your share of voice. - Scrunch’s Suggested Competitors feature helps auto‑detect brands to add to your watchlist.
What should my target metrics be for brand presence? - There aren’t universal benchmarks yet. Start with your current baseline and improve consistently and incrementally. - Use top competitors in your space to set realistic targets. Focus on a limited number of key topics and track improvements over multiple weeks. See practical guidance in the benchmarks and baselines FAQ.
Which AI platforms and LLMs can Scrunch track and monitor? - Scrunch currently supports ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, Meta AI, and Microsoft Copilot. Support for Grok is coming soon. See the full FAQ on supported platforms.
Does Scrunch track sentiment about my brand in AI responses? - Yes. Scrunch classifies sentiment as positive, mixed, or negative. Read the sentiment FAQ for details.
Does Scrunch show change over time? - Yes. Use customizable date ranges and visuals to analyze trends. Learn how to interpret trend windows in the change‑over‑time FAQ.
Does Scrunch track placement in AI responses? - Yes. Scrunch shows whether your brand appears at the top, middle, or bottom of AI answers—both in aggregate and per prompt. See the placement FAQ.
How accurate is Scrunch at tracking brand presence across LLMs? - Scrunch collects actual AI responses from major platforms and uses pattern matching validated against continuously updated datasets to detect explicit brand mentions. Read the accuracy FAQ.
How many prompts should I track for AI search? - Estimate with: number of core topics × 5–8 related questions per topic. Aim for a representative sample across journey stages with a mix of branded and non‑branded prompts. See the prompt volume FAQ for a walkthrough.