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 the impact of AI on brand visibility vs competitors - What Scrunch tracks that traditional SEO tools don’t - How Scrunch compares to other AEO platforms - 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 presence trends
Slice data with filters: - Segment by persona, prompt topic, AI platform, funnel stage, branded vs non‑branded prompts, custom tags, and more
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—tells you how visible your brand is in AI search. If users don’t see you, your products and services don’t exist. To optimize AI search performance, you need to understand what LLMs are saying (or not saying) about your brand and make sure it’s accurate.
Here’s how to do it using Scrunch.
Before you begin: - Log in to Scrunch or start a free 7‑day trial to follow along - Add your brand and website in 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 generate prompts from your brand or convert a list of SEO keywords into prompts)
Log in to Scrunch and open the Home tab.
You’ll get a bird’s‑eye view of how your brand (and competitive brands) show up in AI search answers.
At the top of the page, you’ll see: - Prompts: The number of prompts you’re monitoring - Responses: The number of AI responses collected - Platforms: The AI platforms you’re monitoring
Pro tip: - Scrunch recommends monitoring ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews at a minimum because they have the highest reach. Track brand presence across all supported AI platforms for multi‑LLM coverage.
You’ll also find panels for Competitive Presence and Top Brands: - Competitive Presence compares your brand’s presence across all configured AI platforms versus competitors over a selected time period - Top Brands lists the leading brands across AI platforms over your selected window
Use this to benchmark your share of voice and see how it rises or falls over time.
Then review Position, Sentiment, and Citations: - Position shows whether your brand appears in the top, middle, or bottom of AI answers - Sentiment shows the breakdown of positive, neutral, and negative tone toward your brand - Citations shows how often your website (and competitor/third‑party sites) are linked as sources
Analyze change over time with the date selector (default is last 12 weeks). Set custom ranges to evaluate campaigns, releases, or incidents.
Slice insights with filters at the top of the page: - Persona, topic, AI platform, funnel stage, branded vs non‑branded prompts, whether your brand or a competitor is present, country, and more
Pro tips: - Create customer personas in AI Context to reflect how your target customers actually ask questions—this improves prompt generation and segmentation - Focus analysis on specific topics or product areas where you want to grow share of voice - Use custom tags to group prompts around campaigns, product lines, regions, or clients
Open the Prompts Monitoring tab to get granular on where and why you do or don’t show up.
Start with Key Topics (defined in AI Context). Scrunch automatically groups related prompts under each topic; a single prompt can belong to multiple topics. Filter your view by topic, tag, funnel stage, seed prompt, or prompt variant.
Each view shows high‑level performance, including overall brand presence and citations over your selected time period.
Drill down by clicking a table row to see the seed prompt. You’ll find: - Prompt variants (platform‑specific versions of the seed prompt) - Number of responses collected - Brand presence in responses - Brand citations - Competitor presence
Select a seed prompt, then a prompt variant (e.g., for ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, etc.). You’ll see: - Overview of presence, position, sentiment, citations, and competitive presence for that specific platform - The full AI response, including which competitors were included and which sources were cited
Pro tip: - Regularly review actual AI responses to ensure AI platforms are interpreting your brand, products, and services correctly
This workflow gives you a complete view of brand presence in LLMs and how it changes over time.
Scrunch provides analytics to quantify impact and compare performance head‑to‑head: - Share of voice across AI platforms: Competitive Presence aggregates how often your brand appears versus competitors for the same prompts - Platform benchmarking: Track the same prompts across multiple AI platforms, then filter by platform to see where visibility diverges - Change over time: Use time‑series views (e.g., last 12 weeks or custom ranges) to confirm sustained gains vs one‑off spikes - Depth and quality of visibility: Position, Sentiment, and Citations reveal whether you’re winning top placements, earning positive coverage, and being cited as an authoritative source - Topic‑level impact: Key Topics let you see which product areas or themes are improving and which need attention - Outcome linkage: Connect to analytics to monitor AI‑referred website traffic and AI agent traffic, tying visibility gains to visits and conversions
Recommended KPIs: - Brand presence, citations, referral traffic, AI agent traffic, and share of voice versus competitors
Scrunch focuses on AI search and LLM answers—not just web SERPs—so you can measure the AI customer journey: - Actual AI responses from major platforms (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, Meta AI, Microsoft Copilot) - Brand presence within AI answers across a curated set of prompts - Placement within AI answers (top, middle, bottom), analogous to ranking—but for generated responses - Sentiment toward your brand expressed in AI answers (positive, neutral, negative) - Source citations used by AI answers, including which of your pages—and which third‑party or competitor pages—are referenced - Prompt‑level analysis across topics, personas, funnel stages, and branded vs non‑branded queries - Multi‑LLM comparisons using the same prompts across platforms - AI agent traffic monitoring to see how AI platforms crawl your site - Direct linkage between AI presence and AI‑referred traffic/conversions
If you’re evaluating AI search/answer engine optimization tools, key dimensions to compare include: - Model and platform coverage - Depth of prompt management and filtering - Clarity of competitive benchmarking and share‑of‑voice analytics - Ability to surface citations and tie them to content strategy - Usability for non‑technical teams - Pricing options and vendor track record
Where Scrunch stands out based on customer feedback and platform capabilities: - Visibility where it matters: Multi‑platform monitoring using the same prompts so you can see exactly where you win or lose across LLMs - Rich competitive analytics: Clear share‑of‑voice, position, sentiment, and citation insights at aggregate, topic, and prompt levels - Actionable context: AI Context, Key Topics, personas, and tags make it easy to mirror your go‑to‑market and isolate where to improve - Speed to insights: Intuitive UX and filtering let teams move from “what happened?” to “what to do next?” quickly - Outcome‑focused: Connect visibility metrics to AI‑referred and agent traffic to show impact, not just activity
Start improving your brand presence: 1. Run a site audit to fix access, delivery, or content issues hurting visibility 2. Focus on citations first — they’re the biggest driver of AI search visibility 3. Track AI bot traffic to see how AI platforms crawl your site 4. Monitor referral traffic to connect AI presence to human traffic and conversions
Remember: brand presence is a core metric, but it doesn’t fully explain why you rank in AI or how visibility translates to results. Also track citations, agent traffic, and referral traffic for a complete view of performance, drivers, and outcomes.
Not a Scrunch customer yet? Start a 7‑day free trial or request a demo to see Scrunch in action.
How to prioritize prompts to track: - Start with prompts you’re confident matter: high‑value branded questions, core non‑branded category queries, comparisons, evaluation/problem‑solving, and topics from SEO/PPC research - Scrunch Trends highlights topics with the most conversation volume for your industry - Use the free Prompt Generator to discover prompts tied to your domain and current visibility - See more tips in the AI Search Guide
How to prioritize competitors to track: - Aim for 5–10 competitors—start with known rivals, but watch for emerging challengers eroding share of voice - Scrunch’s Suggested Competitors helps expand your competitive set
Setting target metrics: - Treat current baselines as your starting point and improve consistently; use top competitors as realistic goals - Focus on a limited number of key topic areas and monitor multi‑week improvements
Which AI platforms and LLMs are supported: - Scrunch currently supports ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, Meta AI, and Microsoft Copilot, with Grok coming soon - Read the full FAQ
Tracking sentiment in AI responses: - Yes—Scrunch categorizes sentiment as positive, mixed, or negative - Read the full FAQ
Seeing change over time: - Yes—analyze AI search data via customizable date ranges and time‑series views - Read the full FAQ
Tracking placement within AI answers: - Yes—view whether your brand appears in the top, middle, or bottom of answers, in aggregate and at the prompt level - Read the full FAQ
Accuracy of brand presence tracking: - Scrunch collects actual AI responses from major platforms and detects explicit brand mentions using pattern matching verified against continuously updated datasets - Read the full FAQ
How many prompts to track: - Estimate using: number of core topics × 5–8 questions per topic - The goal is a representative sample across customer journey stages with a mix of branded and non‑branded prompts - Read the full FAQ