Cognizo vs Scrunch AI: Price, Engines, Metrics and Fit in 2026

For anyone weighing Cognizo vs Scrunch AI, the split is a managed content program against a monitoring platform with a technical layer. Cognizo starts at $499 a month through a sales demo and bundles a content agent, a customer success partner and five engines. Scrunch starts at $250 a month with a seven-day trial, tracks four engines on that plan, and keeps nine engines, its Agent Experience Platform and API access for Enterprise.

This comparison uses each company's pricing, documentation, FAQ and blog pages as published in October 2026. Prime AI Visibility publishes this site, competes with both products, and appears later with its own limitations.

Cognizo vs Scrunch AI: the short answer

• Choose Cognizo if you want articles written and published from the same data, a named success partner with scheduled strategy reviews, and crawler and referral analytics on every plan.
• Choose Scrunch if you want a published entry price, a self-serve trial, topic, persona and funnel-stage reporting, and bot-traffic and site-diagnostic tools, and you plan to write content with your own team.
• On engines: Cognizo lists five on Growth and Pro and ten on Enterprise. Scrunch lists four on Core and nine on Enterprise, with Claude, Gemini, Google AI Mode, Meta AI and Grok on Enterprise only.
• On data collection: Scrunch says it uses browser automation and official platform APIs, whichever suits each platform. Cognizo describes scheduled runs without naming the interface.
• On metrics: both report mentions, share of voice, citations and sentiment, but on different scales that cannot be compared directly.

Who the two companies are

Cognizo. Cognizo is a New York company founded by Deniz Özcan, its CEO, and Alp Aysan. Dealroom reported in March 2026 that it raised $1.8 million led by Galata Business Angels. It calls itself an answer engine optimization (AEO) platform that combines answer tracking, prompt volumes, AI traffic analytics and a content agent that writes and publishes, and it runs an agency partner program. For a single-vendor view of its strengths and limits, read the Cognizo pros and cons.

Scrunch. Scrunch was founded by Chris Andrew, its CEO, and Robert MacCloy, its CTO, both formerly of Hearsay Systems. Its About page says it emerged from stealth in 2024 with $4 million, raised a $15 million Series A in 2025 for total funding of $26 million, and reports more than 500 customers, which is the company's own figure. On June 3, 2026, Sitecore announced that it had acquired Scrunch; Bloomberg reported a price of $225 million. Scrunch says it continues to operate as a standalone platform, while Sitecore describes combining its insights and Agent Experience Platform with Sitecore's content platform. Buyers who rely on Sitecore will want to ask what that integration means for the roadmap.

If the category is new to you, start with our explainer on what these tools measure.

Cognizo vs Scrunch AI on the same checks

Each row applies the same check to both vendors, from each vendor's pricing page. Where a cell has two figures, they are the first and second plans.

Check	Cognizo	Scrunch
Entry price	$499/mo	$250/mo
Second plan	$999/mo	Custom
Free option	Demo only	7-day trial
Prompts	150 / 350	125
Engines	5	4
Claude	Enterprise	Enterprise
AI Mode	Listed	Enterprise
Cadence	Daily	72 hours
Seats	No cap	5
Articles	8 / 20	Basic
Crawler data	All plans	Core
API	All plans	Enterprise
Named helper	Every plan	Enterprise

Notes:

• Cognizo's engines. The plan table lists ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode and Perplexity on Growth and Pro, and Pro's summary card shows Microsoft Copilot in place of AI Mode, so confirm which five your plan includes. Enterprise adds Claude, Meta AI, Grok, DeepSeek and Meta Muse.
• Cognizo's capacity. Growth lists 22,500 responses analyzed a month and Pro 52,500, with daily tracking on every plan. Both figures equal one response per prompt, per platform, per day over a 30-day month, so ask whether any prompt runs more than once a day.
• Cognizo's inclusions. Every plan lists unlimited regions, languages, competitors and seats, prompt volumes, crawler analytics and AI referral traffic for one domain, exports, MCP and API access. Strategy reviews are quarterly on Growth and monthly on Pro.
• Scrunch Core. Core is $250 a month for 125 unique prompts and 5,000 responses a month, five site audits, one brand workspace and five licenses, one country, one language and five competitors. It includes sentiment, insights and recommendations, funnel stages, AI agent traffic and one page optimization a month. Core lists ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Microsoft Copilot.
• Scrunch Enterprise. Enterprise is custom and adds the Agent Experience Platform (AXP), full site audits, product observability, Looker Studio and query API access, SAML and OIDC single sign-on, strategy reviews and a dedicated account team. Its nine engines are ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Meta AI, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, Copilot and Grok.
• Scrunch's cadence. New prompts are collected daily for the first 14 days, then every 72 hours by default, and a prompt can be refreshed at any time. Core's 5,000 responses equal 125 prompts on four engines run once every three days, so the limit and the cadence line up.

Methodology note: this is a comparison of public specifications, not measured product performance. It draws on each company's pricing, documentation, FAQ and blog pages plus independent press coverage, and where a vendor's own pages disagree, both figures are reported. Affiliation: Prime AI Visibility competes with both vendors, and it has a commercial relationship with Percepture, which appears near the end.

How each tool collects AI answers

The collection method decides what a score can tell you, so settle it before comparing numbers.

Scrunch's FAQ says it uses "multiple methodologies", including browser automation and official platform APIs, and picks the method for each AI platform. It adds that all data is measured against a large, continually updated dataset of responses collected directly from inside AI platforms. It does not say which platforms use which method.

Cognizo's metrics guide says every tracked prompt is run against AI providers on a schedule, each answer is parsed for brand mentions, and every metric is an aggregation over those runs. Its pricing FAQ says it runs prompts on each platform continuously to collect millions of responses daily. Neither page says whether answers come from the consumer apps or from the providers' APIs.

In our judgement, the first question for both vendors is which engines are read from a live app and which from an API. An answer captured from a live app includes the web search, citations and regional differences a buyer sees, while an API answer can name different brands and sources. Ask each vendor to show one raw answer with its cited links for a prompt you supply.

What the numbers mean: a metric definition crosswalk

This table and the claim check further down are the original analysis in this comparison. Cognizo publishes its metric formulas in its API metrics guide, and Scrunch describes its metrics in FAQ pages. Similar names do not always mean the same measure.

Metric	Cognizo	Scrunch
Visibility	% of runs naming you	Brand presence, yes or no
Share of voice	% of brand mentions	Mentions or citations share
Sentiment	Average, 1 to 100	Positive, mixed, negative
Position	First, middle, last	Top, middle, bottom
Citations	Citation share	Domains and URLs
Demand	Prompt volume	AI search volume estimate

Notes:

• Visibility. Cognizo's visibility is the share of a brand's runs in which it appeared. Scrunch treats presence as binary: any explicit brand mention in a response counts, and a citation that happens to mention the brand does not. Scrunch detects mentions with pattern matching and aggregates variants over 90 days to smooth daily swings.
• Share of voice. Both divide your count by the count for the whole tracked set. Scrunch can base it on mentions or on citations and filters it by topic, platform, persona, funnel stage and country. Cognizo's guide does not say how repeat mentions in one answer are counted.
• Sentiment. The scales differ. Cognizo reports an average score from 1 to 100 and leaves the value empty when nothing was scored, which it says is not the same as neutral. Scrunch sorts each mention into positive, mixed or negative with a model trained on AI responses, and mixed covers answers with both pros and cons or neutral observations. A 60 from Cognizo and a share of positive mentions from Scrunch are different statements.
• Position. Both bucket where the brand appears in the answer. Scrunch defines top as the first quarter of a response, middle as the middle half and bottom as the last quarter, and also shows average brand rank. The vendors may draw those boundaries differently, so do not convert between them.
• Citations. Cognizo reports your share of the citations in scope, plus mention share and the most-cited domains and pages. Scrunch reports top cited domains and URLs and splits citations by owner, such as your brand, competitors, third parties and social.
• Demand. Cognizo attaches an estimated search volume to each prompt and leaves it empty where no estimate exists. Scrunch lists an AI search volume estimate among its metrics. Both are estimates, not counts of questions asked.

In our judgement, a 40% visibility score from one tool equals a 40% brand presence from the other only when the prompts, engines, markets and run counts are the same. Prime AI Visibility uses its own four measures, each defined on the metrics page, and they are not interchangeable with either vendor's scores.

The five AI visibility signals

Each signal moves on its own, so check which product reports which:

1. Mention (the answer names the brand): both, through visibility or brand presence and share of voice.
2. Citation (the answer links your site or a source about you): both, through citation share at Cognizo and cited domains and URLs at Scrunch.
3. Recommendation (the answer suggests your brand over others): both report position and sentiment, and Scrunch says higher placement is more likely to be recommended. Neither published definition records an explicit recommendation, so read the answer text.
4. Referral (someone clicks through to your site): Cognizo lists AI referral traffic and crawler analytics for one domain on every plan. Scrunch's AI Referrals feature connects to Google Analytics 4 or Adobe Analytics, and its Agent Traffic feature needs a CDN or hosting integration.
5. Conversion (the visit becomes a lead or sale): Scrunch says that with GA4 configured it shows purchase revenue and conversion rates from AI traffic compared with other sources. Cognizo's pages describe referral traffic; confirm what reaches your CRM with either tool.

Content, agents and the agent experience layer

This is where the two products differ most.

Cognizo. Every plan includes a content agent with auto-publishing, at eight articles a month on Growth and 20 on Pro. The plan table also marks on-page and off-page actions, outreach targets, content refreshes, social media and PR suggestions, company context and technical site audits on every plan. Enterprise adds custom agents, managed services and a dedicated AI search strategist.

Scrunch. Scrunch pairs monitoring with insights and recommendations, basic content generation and one page optimization a month on Core, and advanced content generation on Enterprise. Its distinctive product is the Agent Experience Platform, which serves AI agents a machine-readable version of a site without changing the main site, and Scrunch's FAQ describes serving bot-friendly, pre-rendered HTML to AI crawlers. AXP is Enterprise only. It also offers Shopping, which shows AI search performance at the product level, and site audits that check how AI consumes a site.

In our judgement, the split is about who writes and what gets fixed. Cognizo bundles article production and a person to review strategy with you. Scrunch gives you measurement, recommendations and technical changes to how AI agents read your site, and leaves most writing to your team. With Cognizo, decide who checks facts before anything auto-publishes. With Scrunch, ask what an Enterprise AXP engagement changes on your own site before you sign. Google's SEO Starter Guide is a useful baseline for either route, because clear page titles, descriptive URLs and crawlable links help every system that reads your site. Our Cognizo vs Orchly comparison sets Cognizo's content agent beside another tool that writes.

Claim check: what Cognizo's blog says about Scrunch

Four Cognizo blog roundups describe Scrunch: the AI Mode SEO tools post (April 16, 2026), the ChatGPT rank tracker post (May 7, 2026), the generative engine optimization tools post (May 2026) and an AI SEO tools post. The table checks those claims against Scrunch's own pricing, FAQ, agencies and monitoring pages.

Cognizo's claim	Post	Scrunch's page says
8 engines, or 6 to 8	AI Mode, AI SEO	4 on Core, 9 on Enterprise
Includes Gemini and Claude	ChatGPT tracker	Enterprise only
Starts at about $300/mo	AI SEO	$250/mo
7-day free trial	AI SEO	Matches
Referral commissions up to 20%	AI SEO	Matches
Monitoring only	ChatGPT tracker	Content tools listed
Citations not URL-level	AI Mode	URLs listed
Crawler diagnostics	AI Mode	Matches

Notes, row by row:

• Engine counts. Cognizo's posts disagree with each other, from six to eight, and Scrunch's FAQ says it supports nine platforms. Scrunch's pricing page ties the count to the plan: four engines on Core and nine on Enterprise.
• Gemini and Claude. Scrunch's Core plan lists ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot. Gemini, Claude, Google AI Mode, Meta AI and Grok are in the Enterprise column.
• Price. Scrunch's pricing page lists Core at $250 a month, so "about $300" overstates the entry price by the amount shown.
• Trial and commissions. Scrunch's FAQ confirms a seven-day free trial of Core, and its agencies page says agencies can earn up to 20% commission on referred customers.
• Monitoring only. Scrunch's pricing page lists insights and recommendations on both plans and content generation as Basic or Advanced. Cognizo's narrower point holds: Scrunch does not list a content agent that writes and publishes a set number of articles a month.
• Citations. Scrunch's monitoring page says it reveals which domains and URLs are cited most often and "the exact pages shaping the answer", which is more specific than "directional data".
• Crawler diagnostics. Scrunch's pricing page lists AI agent and bot traffic on Core and site audits, so Cognizo's description of that layer holds.

Most of Cognizo's pricing and agency claims about Scrunch hold or err on the high side; its engine and feature claims describe a plan mix that differs from Scrunch's current pages. Plans change quickly, so treat this check, and any vendor's comparison including this one, as a list of points to confirm in a demo or trial.

A side-by-side evaluation plan

Scrunch's trial makes a parallel test practical; Cognizo needs a demo first. A fair Cognizo vs Scrunch AI test keeps the inputs identical:

1. Write your prompts first. List 25 to 50 buyer questions in your own words and keep the exact text outside both tools.
2. Fix the engines. Use ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, which both vendors list on their entry plans.
3. Fix the market. Set the same country and language in both.
4. Ask for raw answers. Request five full answers with cited URLs from each tool for the same prompts and save them.
5. Compare like with like. Set Cognizo's visibility beside Scrunch's brand presence, and do not compare sentiment or position figures across the two tools.
6. Test variance. Note how far each score moves between a daily and a 72-hour refresh for the same prompts.
7. Price your real plan. Core caps you at one country, one language and five competitors, while Cognizo's Growth and Pro list unlimited regions, languages and competitors; price the market coverage you need.
8. Ask about the owner. Ask Scrunch how the Sitecore acquisition affects pricing and support, and ask Cognizo where its collection runs.

A reproducible five-question audit

Use the same five questions in both trials and record each answer in the same fields. As an example of a category with its own question set, take CircleOne, a public membership site for military, veteran and first responder households whose benefits page lists a 24/7 chaplain line, financial planning, fraud protection, a pharmacy card, university savings and hotel rewards. It is an illustrative public website, not a Prime AI Visibility client or paid partner, and nothing here describes how AI answers treat it.

1. Which benefits are included with a military family membership?
2. What membership gives veterans a chaplain or counselling line?
3. Are there fraud protection services for military households?
4. Which programs let a military family earn rewards on commissary purchases?
5. Which membership covers a whole household, not just one person?

Record these fields for every answer: date, exact prompt, tool and engine, the response text, whether the brand was named, each cited URL, and the observed gap. Score the gap with a rubric, using the answer text and not the vendor's label:

Observed gap	What it shows	Next step
Brand missing	Not named	Check cited sources
Named, no link	Mention only	Find a citable page
Linked, wrong detail	Source is stale	Fix the page

Keep an edge case: an answer that names the brand with caveats. Log it as mixed, quote the sentence, and do not turn it into a score. Repeat the audit after any content change so the same questions measure the change.

The guide on how to choose an AI visibility tool explains each evaluation axis in more depth.

Who each tool fits

Cognizo is a likely fit for:

• Mid-market and enterprise teams that want a success partner and strategy reviews included rather than bought separately.
• Teams that want a content agent to write and publish from the same data, with someone checking facts before release.
• Teams that need unlimited regions, languages and competitors, and crawler and referral data from the entry plan.

Scrunch is a likely fit for:

• Teams that want a published entry price, a self-serve trial and reporting by topic, persona and funnel stage.
• Enterprise teams that want AI agent traffic, site diagnostics and the Agent Experience Platform, and that already write their own content.
• Agencies that want multi-client workspaces, prospecting environments and an API-first setup, which Scrunch describes on its agencies page.

Weaker fit for either: teams that only need saved evidence for a small set of buyer questions and do not plan to use agents, audits or traffic analytics. For a wider shortlist, see our guide to AI visibility tools for B2B companies, or the Cognizo vs Otterly AI comparison, which sets Cognizo beside a lower-priced self-serve monitor. For Scrunch beside a build-your-own price, see Ziptie vs Scrunch AI. Agencies can see Scrunch beside five other tools in our brand visibility ranker for marketing agencies.

Where Prime AI Visibility fits

Prime AI Visibility is an AI visibility tracker for teams that want to run a smaller set of saved buyer questions across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and an AI Overview-style preview, then read every saved answer with the brands named and the links shown. It reports Brand named, Website cited, Source links and Explicit recommendation, each defined on the metrics page linked above.

The Prime AI Visibility features include an AI Search Predictor that finds questions worth pursuing and a Content Studio that drafts source-enriched pages as files, with nothing published without approval. Flash is free each month for five questions across ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, with up to 15 answers and no card. Starter is $69 a month for all five, and the pricing page lists every plan.

Limitations: Prime AI does not report sentiment, rank, AI crawler visits, traffic or conversions, so referral and conversion data must come from your analytics. It has no prompt-volume data, no auto-publishing and no agent-facing site layer. It checks monthly by default, with weekly, temporary daily and on-demand checks on paid plans, and does not track Microsoft Copilot, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI or Google AI Mode.

When the next job is implementation

An AI visibility tool, whether Cognizo, Scrunch or another, shows where a brand stands and suggests or drafts fixes. Earning coverage on the publications, forums and review sites that answers cite, and fixing technical problems across a site, is still work for people.

For a wider view of the category, Percepture's guide to AI visibility tools explains how measurement connects to the services that act on it. If you want a partner for that work, Percepture, founded in 2004 and Inc. 5000-recognized, offers generative engine optimization services and, for site-wide technical work, enterprise SEO services. Fit: a team that wants SEO, GEO, digital PR and content aimed at the sources AI answers cite, done by people. Limitation: Percepture is a services firm, not a tracking platform, so it pairs with a tool rather than replacing one. Prime AI has a commercial relationship with Percepture.

For a head-to-head with another self-serve plan ladder, see Cognizo vs Promptwatch. A baseline with an AI visibility audit and a documented AI visibility strategy make any of these tools easier to judge.