Answer Engine Optimization Goes Mainstream: Sitecore Buys Scrunch

Sitecore Just Made Answer Engine Optimization a Boardroom Topic

On June 3, 2026, Sitecore acquired Scrunch, a platform built for answer engine optimization — the practice of making your brand visible, accurate, and recommended inside AI answers from ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Perplexity. The deal matters far beyond Sitecore’s customer base. When a Tier-1 DXP vendor pays to own this capability, it signals that influencing AI answers has moved from a marketing experiment to a boardroom priority.

This article is written from a deliberately vendor-neutral seat. Our team includes a 2× Sitecore Technology MVP and Coveo alumni, and we have delivered 50+ platform audits across enterprise environments — including composable clients like iA Financial Group, FTQ, and Cirque du Soleil. As a result, we can read this move without a sales agenda and tell you what it actually means for your stack.

The short version: answer engine optimization is no longer optional, Sitecore is not the first mover, and you should not wait for your DXP vendor to decide your AI-visibility strategy for you.

What Scrunch Actually Does

Scrunch is an AI customer experience platform focused on answer engine optimization and AI-answer visibility. In practice, it shows brands where their messages appear, where they are missing, and where they are misrepresented across AI-powered discovery platforms. According to the official Sitecore announcement, Scrunch also delivers prescriptive recommendations across multiple large language models and flags the rendering and indexing issues that quietly limit AI discoverability.

Furthermore, Scrunch ships an Agent Experience Platform that formats content for AI agents without disrupting the human-facing experience. The reported results are not trivial, either. Akamai saw a 364% increase in brand presence for non-branded prompts, and Runpod reported a 400% increase in paying customers attributed to AI-search optimization. Consequently, Sitecore can now wire these signals directly into its content workflows under the SitecoreAI banner.

Adobe Got There First

Here is the part the press cycle is underplaying: Adobe moved on this nearly a year earlier. Adobe announced LLM Optimizer in June 2025 and made it generally available on October 14, 2025. In other words, while Sitecore chose to buy a capability in mid-2026, Adobe chose to build one and ship it first.

The Adobe data made the business case hard to argue with. An analysis of early-access customers found that 80% had critical content-visibility gaps inside AI answers. Meanwhile, Adobe’s own content adjustments drove a 200% increase in LLM visibility for Adobe Acrobat versus competitors and a 41% increase in LLM-referred traffic to Adobe.com. You can read the details in Adobe’s announcement, and TechTarget’s coverage frames it as Adobe formally entering AI-search optimization.

So is Adobe leading by example? On timing and conviction, yes. Adobe treated answer engine optimization as a first-party product a full release cycle before its closest rival reached for the checkbook. That gap tells you how seriously the category leaders now take AI-driven discovery.

Why DXP Vendors Are Racing Into Answer Engine Optimization

Two forces explain why DXP vendors are racing into answer engine optimization at the same time. First, buyer behavior has shifted fast. Adobe observed a 1,100% year-over-year increase in AI traffic to U.S. retail sites in September 2025, and those AI-referred visitors converted at higher rates than traditional search traffic. Therefore, the audience your content needs to reach is increasingly an AI model, not a human scanning a results page.

Second, the unit of optimization has changed. For two decades, teams optimized “the page” for Google. Now the unit is “the answer” — a synthesized response that may cite you, ignore you, or describe you incorrectly. As Scrunch’s leadership put it, customers increasingly trust AI to define brands. Consequently, whoever owns the layer that shapes those answers owns a powerful piece of the customer relationship, and every DXP vendor wants that real estate.

The Catch: Vendor-Bundled AEO Comes With Lock-In

However, there is a catch that the launch blogs will not highlight. When answer engine optimization is bundled into your DXP, your AI-visibility strategy becomes only as portable as your platform contract. In short, you risk solving an open, cross-channel problem with a single-vendor tool.

That matters because AI answers draw on far more than your owned website. They pull from Wikipedia, public forums, analyst notes, review sites, and competitor content. A tool wired tightly into one CMS can optimize what that CMS controls, yet much of your AI footprint lives outside it. As a result, a vendor-bundled solution can create a false sense of coverage while the off-site signals that actually move citations go unmanaged.

This is exactly why a vendor-neutral perspective helps. Sengo is an official implementation partner of Sitecore, Optimizely, Contentful, and others, so we can advise on these tools and still tell you honestly where a bundled approach falls short. To see how we evaluate this across platforms, review our CMS & DXP platforms overview.

What Enterprise Leaders Should Do Before Their DXP Decides for Them

You do not need to wait for a Sitecore or Adobe upgrade cycle to act. In fact, the smartest move is to build a baseline now, while the category is still forming. Here is the sequence we use with enterprise clients.

• Measure your current AI-answer presence. Run a baseline across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity for your priority topics. You cannot improve what you have never measured.
• Audit your rendered HTML. Many enterprise DXPs render content through client-side JavaScript that AI crawlers do not execute. Consequently, your most important pages may be near-invisible to the models.
• Ship structured data. FAQPage, Article, and Organization schema turn ambiguous prose into machine-readable facts that AI engines weigh heavily when choosing citations.
• Manage off-site signals. Treat analyst relations, third-party listings, and digital PR as answer engine optimization inputs, not separate disciplines.
• Stay portable. Keep your AI-visibility data and playbook independent of any single platform, so a future DXP change never resets your progress.

Most importantly, do not let a vendor roadmap set your AI strategy by default. The Sitecore and Adobe moves validate the problem; they do not obligate you to solve it inside their walls.

Answer Engine Optimization in a Bilingual Quebec Market

For Quebec enterprises, answer engine optimization carries a dimension most global tools handle poorly: French-Canadian answer behavior. Specifically, when a user queries an AI model in French, the model often falls back to English sources because authoritative FR-CA content is scarce. As a result, Quebec brands routinely watch competitors get cited in answers that should belong to them.

Fixing this is not a translation problem — it is an entity problem. First, your FR-CA content must exist with the same structural rigor as the English version, not a thin pass over marketing copy. Second, your schema and language tagging must associate French pages with French queries. Because Sengo runs a fully bilingual team, we treat the French answer layer as a first-class deliverable rather than an afterthought.

The bottom line is straightforward. Sitecore buying Scrunch and Adobe shipping LLM Optimizer both confirm the same truth: brands now have to understand and shape how AI answers describe them. The vendors validated the category. Your job is to own your AI visibility on your terms — measured, portable, and bilingual — instead of renting it from whichever platform moves next.