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

Ziptie vs Scrunch AI is a choice between a build-your-own price and a plan ladder. Ziptie (the ziptie.ai platform) charges for the prompts and engines you pick, with a 7-day trial and presets from $25.65 a month. Scrunch lists Core at $250 a month with a 7-day trial and four engines, and keeps nine engines, its Agent Experience Platform and API access for a custom Enterprise plan. The two count usage differently, so the prices are not like for like.

This comparison reads each company's pricing, product, methodology and FAQ pages as published in October 2026. It is not a hands-on test, and no product was run. Prime AI Visibility publishes this site, competes with both products and appears later with its own limitations.

One naming note: Ziptie runs two separate products built by the same team. ziptie.dev is the original product and is still running, and ziptie.ai is the newer platform that tracks a brand across up to seven AI engines. This page covers ziptie.ai, because its pages describe the engines, prices and methods compared here.

Ziptie vs Scrunch AI: the short answer

• Choose Ziptie if you want to size a plan by prompts, engines and check frequency, with unlimited seats, projects and competitors, and you accept that it reads answers only and cannot see crawler hits or referral visits.
• Choose Scrunch if you want a published monthly entry price with bot-traffic reporting and site audits on the entry plan, and a path to an agent-facing site layer on Enterprise.
• On engines: Ziptie lists seven surfaces, including Bing AI Overview, and does not list Claude. 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: Ziptie says it captures answers through AI-answer data providers. Scrunch says it uses browser automation and official platform APIs, whichever suits each platform.
• On metrics: both report mentions, citations and sentiment, but with different formulas and scales that cannot be compared directly.

Who the two companies are

Ziptie. Ziptie's home page describes ziptie.ai as built by SEO experts and shows a logo strip of companies under the heading "Trusted by teams at". That strip is Ziptie's own statement, and this page does not repeat it as verified. The platform's loop is discover, prepare and verify: it captures answers, builds a ranked action queue, and lets you mark a published fix on a trend line. Its methodology page says it observes what answer engines publicly say, with nothing installed on your site.

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, 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, and Bloomberg reported a price of $225 million. Scrunch says it continues to operate as a standalone platform. Buyers who rely on Sitecore will want to ask what the integration means for the roadmap. For a closer look at Scrunch beside a managed content program, read Cognizo vs Scrunch AI.

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

Ziptie vs Scrunch AI on the same checks

Each row applies the same check to both vendors, from each vendor's own pages. Not listed means the pages read did not state it.

Check	Ziptie	Scrunch
Pricing shape	Build your own	Core, Enterprise
Entry price	From $25.65/mo	$250/mo
Free option	7-day trial	7-day trial
Engines	Up to 7	4, or 9
Claude	Not listed	Enterprise
AI Mode	Paid plans	Enterprise
Seats	Unlimited	5 on Core
Crawler data	Not tracked	Core
API	$10/mo add-on	Enterprise
Content tools	$20/mo add-on	Basic on Core

Notes:

• Ziptie's price rule. The pricing page says you pay for the prompts you monitor and the engines you run them on. One prompt, one engine and one check costs $0.01, or $0.0087 a check across all seven engines. A prompt is a slot you hold, and a daily prompt re-runs every 24 hours at no extra cost. Nothing is billed for seats, projects, competitors, exports, client reports or share links.
• Ziptie's presets. Starter is from $25.65 a month, Professional from $340.20 and Enterprise from $1,647. The calculator's default build, three engines with a $9.00 prompt subtotal, shows $25.65. Billing quarterly saves 5%, semi-annually 10% and annually 20% on the plan price. The page says paid subscriptions are not refunded.
• Ziptie's trial. The 7-day trial needs no card and covers 25 daily prompts on ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Microsoft Copilot. Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Bing AI Overview and Gemini unlock on a paid plan, and the API and add-ons do not start in the trial.
• 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 and bot traffic, one page optimization a month and basic content generation. Core lists ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot.
• Scrunch Enterprise. Enterprise is custom and adds expanded model coverage, the Agent Experience Platform, full site audits, product observability, Looker Studio and query API access, SAML and OIDC single sign-on, strategy reviews and a dedicated account team.
• 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.

Methodology note: this is a comparison of public specifications, not measured product performance. It draws on each company's pricing, methodology, documentation and FAQ pages, and where a figure appears on only one page the table says which. Affiliation: Prime AI Visibility competes with both vendors, and it has a commercial relationship with Percepture, which appears near the end.

How the two price models behave as you grow

Ziptie states the units, and Scrunch states a plan. That is the main reason a headline price comparison misleads.

Question	Ziptie answers	Scrunch answers
What grows the bill?	Prompts, engines, cadence	Plan tier, then custom
What is capped?	Prompt slots in each pool	Prompts and responses
What is custom?	Very large plans	Enterprise

Ziptie publishes three worked examples before add-ons: an in-house brand with 50 daily, 300 weekly and 1,000 monthly prompts on all seven engines at $230.95 a month, an agency with ten clients at 50 weekly prompts each on all seven engines at $130.72 a month, and an enterprise long tail of 1,000 monthly prompts at $61.00 a month. Annual billing takes about 20% off those. Scrunch does not publish Enterprise prices, and its Core plan counts responses. This page does not set one against the other, because Core's 5,000 responses and Ziptie's checks are different units, and Scrunch's engine list changes with the tier.

A way to use both pages: write your real prompt list first. Then price it in each vendor's own unit. For example, an invented team with 60 prompts would be inside Core's 125-prompt limit, and in Ziptie's calculator it would be a number of slots on a cadence and an engine count you choose. Where you cannot fill in a vendor's unit, ask the vendor.

How each tool collects AI answers

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

Ziptie's methodology page says every engine is captured through AI-answer data providers, which submit your prompt text, with the project's country, into the engine and return the public answer and its citations. It does not say whether those providers use the consumer apps or the engines' APIs. Cadence is set per project at 1, 7 or 30 days, and each cycle runs every enabled engine. The page says coverage depends on country: for instance, Czechia has no ChatGPT coverage and Italy and Brazil have no Copilot coverage, as a limit of the providers.

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

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

Ziptie publishes its formulas on a methodology page, and Scrunch describes its metrics across FAQ pages. Similar names do not always mean the same measure.

Metric	Ziptie	Scrunch
Mentions	% of answers naming you	Brand presence, yes or no
Citations	% of answers with sources	Domains and URLs
Sentiment	0 to 100, 50 neutral	Positive, mixed, negative
Position	Not reported	Top, middle, bottom
Score	AI Success Score	Not one score
Demand	No prompt-volume data	AI search volume estimate

Notes:

• Mentions. Ziptie's Mentions Rate divides answers that name a tracked brand by every answer an engine returned. A failed check is not an answer and sits in no denominator. Scrunch treats presence as binary: any explicit brand mention in a response counts, and a citation that mentions the brand does not.
• Citations. Ziptie's Citations Rate divides citations by only the answers that carried source links, so an answer with no sources is left out of both sides. Scrunch reports top cited domains and URLs and splits citations by owner, such as your brand, competitors, third parties and social.
• Sentiment. Ziptie scores only answers that mention you: positive pulls above 50, negative below, and mixed sits at neutral. Scrunch sorts each mention into positive, mixed or negative. A 60 from Ziptie and a share of positive mentions from Scrunch are different statements.
• Position. Ziptie says order inside an answer changes from run to run, so it reports how often you are named and cited across many checks, never a position in ChatGPT. Scrunch defines top as the first quarter of a response, middle as the middle half and bottom as the last quarter.
• One score. Ziptie rolls citations, mentions and sentiment into an AI Success Score from 0 to 100, with sentiment weighted by how often you are mentioned. Scrunch reports its measures separately.
• Demand. Ziptie's methodology page says it has no prompt-volume or search-demand dataset, so a monitored set is chosen from what your business is, not a measured sample of demand. Scrunch lists an AI search volume estimate among its metrics, which is an estimate and not a count of questions asked.

In our judgement, a 40% mentions rate 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.
2. Citation (the answer links your site or a source about you): both, with Ziptie's optional UGC Impact Analysis add-on reading the Reddit threads and YouTube videos engines cite and Scrunch showing cited domains and URLs.
3. Recommendation (the answer suggests your brand over others): neither published definition records an explicit recommendation. Read the answer text.
4. Referral (someone clicks through to your site): Ziptie says it cannot see referral sessions and suggests a web-analytics tool alongside it. Scrunch's AI Referrals feature connects to Google Analytics 4 or Adobe Analytics.
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. Ziptie does not report conversions.

Content, agents and what happens after the report

Ziptie. An Action Center turns answers into one ranked queue per project, ordered by severity, then action type, then age. Items include a prompt where no engine has named or cited you across consecutive checks, an engine that stopped naming you, and a competitor that just passed you. A Content Generation add-on, $20 a month per context, drafts briefs and pieces with a fact-check loop, and adds 8 briefs and 4 finished pieces a month to a workspace pool. Ziptie says it never touches your site, and it lists no CMS link and no outbound webhooks.

Scrunch. Scrunch pairs monitoring with insights and recommendations, bot-traffic reporting and site audits on Core. 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 appears on the pricing page as Enterprise-only. It also offers Shopping, which shows AI search performance at the product level.

In our judgement, the split is about what happens after the report. Ziptie centres on a prioritised to-do list and a before-and-after trend you mark yourself. Scrunch adds technical changes to how AI agents read your site. With Ziptie, ask how its action rules map to your prompts. With Scrunch, ask what an Enterprise agent-layer engagement changes on your own site before you sign. Google's SEO Starter Guide is a useful baseline for either route, because it says a sitemap helps Google find your pages but is not required, and it recommends descriptive URLs and reducing duplicate content.

Vendor statements to confirm before you buy

Neither vendor's pages read compare these two products, so this table lists statements on each page and what the page does and does not support. A statement is a vendor's own, not a finding.

Statement	Where	What to confirm
"7 AI surfaces"	Ziptie	Which run in your country
"About a cent a check"	Ziptie	Your engine count
Teams at well-known brands	Ziptie	Which plan and use
"9 LLMs supported"	Scrunch	Enterprise only
500+ customers	Scrunch	Company's own figure
Standalone after acquisition	Scrunch	Roadmap and support

Notes:

• Seven surfaces. Ziptie's methodology page says seven is the platform roster, not a description of any one account, and that a workspace sees only the engines it enables. A country can also remove an engine.
• A cent a check. The $0.01 rate is for one prompt on one engine. The page shows $0.0087 a check across seven engines, so the price depends on how many engines you run.
• Customer logos. The logo strip says teams at those companies trust Ziptie. It does not say which plan, how many people or how they use it, and it is not an endorsement of any result.
• Nine engines. Scrunch's pricing page ties the count to the plan: four engines on Core and nine on Enterprise.
• Customer count. The 500-plus figure comes from Scrunch's About page and is the company's own.
• Standalone. Scrunch says it continues to operate as a standalone platform, and Sitecore describes combining its insights with its own content platform, so ask for specifics.

Plans change quickly, so treat this table, and any vendor's comparison including this one, as a list of points to confirm in a trial or demo.

An operator checklist for scoping AI visibility work

Before you compare tools, scope the job. These seven decisions apply to Ziptie, Scrunch or any other product.

1. Buyer persona. Write who asks the question, such as a first-time buyer, a researcher or a returning customer, and keep one persona per prompt group. Scrunch's Core plan includes one persona.
2. Brand variants. List every spelling, abbreviation and product name an answer might use. Ziptie counts a mention when a configured brand name appears as a whole word in any capitalization, so a missed variant reads as an absence.
3. Prompt inventory. Write 25 to 50 questions in buyers' own words, grouped by decision, and keep the exact text outside every tool.
4. Baseline. Save five full answers with their cited links before any trial, so both products are judged against the same evidence.
5. Sources. Record the domains each answer cites, because your presence often depends on pages you do not own.
6. Cadence. Decide how often you need to see change. Ziptie sets 1, 7 or 30 days per project, and Scrunch defaults to every 72 hours after the first 14 days.
7. Reporting. Decide who reads the report, and keep mention, citation, recommendation, referral and conversion in separate columns.

A question-by-question sample scorecard

The scorecard below is an invented example to show the structure. It is not data from either product or from any real site. The sample site is My Military Savings, whose homepage describes itself as an official resource for military savings and discounts and whose coupons page lists coupons filtered by category. It is an illustrative public website, not a Prime AI Visibility client, endorsement or paid partner, and this page says nothing about how any AI engine treats it.

The useful exercise for a site like that is to look at two things in each answer: which category names the answer uses, and which brands or sources it cites. Score each question with the same fields:

Illustrative question	Observed in the answer	Source shown
Where do military families find commissary coupons?	Site named in a list	Own coupons page
Which pet food coupons work at the commissary?	Site not named	Manufacturer page
How do I get free weekly commissary coupons?	Named, with caveats	Own homepage
Are there monthly giveaways for military families?	Not named	News article
What is the digital commissary circular?	Named first	Own page

Reading the example: "Not named" with a manufacturer page shown tells you which page to study. "Named, with caveats" should be logged as mixed, with the quoted sentence, and never turned into a score. Repeat the same questions after any change so the scorecard measures the change.

A side-by-side evaluation plan

Both vendors offer a 7-day trial, which makes a parallel test practical. A fair Ziptie vs Scrunch AI test keeps the inputs identical:

1. Write your prompts first. Use the 25 to 50 questions from the checklist.
2. Start both trials in the same week. Ziptie's trial covers 25 daily prompts, so keep your list near that.
3. Fix the engines. Compare ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Copilot, which both vendors list in their trials or entry plans, and add Perplexity on a paid plan if both matter.
4. Fix the market. Set the same country in both, and note that Ziptie resolves engines by country.
5. Ask for raw answers. Save five full answers with cited URLs from each tool for the same prompts.
6. Compare like with like. Set Ziptie's Mentions Rate beside Scrunch's brand presence, and do not compare sentiment figures across tools.
7. Price your real list in each vendor's own unit.
8. Ask the final questions. Which engines are in your contract, how answers are collected, how long history is kept, and what can be exported.

The guide on how to choose an AI visibility tool explains each evaluation axis in more depth, and the AI visibility audit process turns the checklist into a baseline.

Who each tool fits

Situation	Likely fit	Why
Many clients, small prompt sets	Ziptie	No seat or project fees
Bot traffic from day one	Scrunch	On the Core plan
Claude or Meta AI needed	Scrunch	Enterprise engines
Bing AI Overview needed	Ziptie	Listed engine
Agent-facing site layer	Scrunch	Enterprise product
Sized by prompts and cadence	Ziptie	Build-your-own price

Ziptie is a likely fit for agencies and in-house teams that want to size a plan by prompts, engines and cadence, keep every client in one pool, and work from a ranked action queue. Limit: it does not see crawler hits or referral visits, has no prompt-volume data and does not list Claude. Scrunch is a likely fit for teams that want bot-traffic reporting, site audits and a published entry price, and enterprises that want the agent-facing layer. Limit: four engines on Core, and Enterprise terms are custom.

A third option: a consultant. Either product can be run by your own team, and some teams hire an AI visibility consultant to scope prompts, read the reports and prioritise fixes. A consultant does not replace the tool. Our guide to AI search visibility services covers service models and what to ask providers before you sign.

For agency readers, see how Scrunch sits beside five other tools in our brand visibility ranker for marketing agencies, and how to report to clients in agency client AI visibility reporting. For a wider shortlist, see AI visibility tools for B2B companies.

Where Prime AI Visibility fits

The AI Visibility Platform from Prime AI is built around saved answers. The free check runs up to five buyer questions across ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, keeps up to 15 answers with the links each displayed and needs no card. It is one check a month. Starter is $69 a month and adds Gemini and an AI Overview-style preview. 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. The pricing page lists every plan.

As an AI visibility checker, the free check gives a baseline to test either product against, and as an AI visibility tracker it keeps the same questions from one month to the next. For teams that want a smaller, evidence-first AI Brand Visibility Tool, it reports Brand named, Website cited, Source links and Explicit recommendation, each defined on the metrics page.

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 action queue, no agent-facing site layer and no auto-publishing. 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. This is an affiliated recommendation, not an independent ranking.

When the next job is implementation

An AI Search Visibility Platform, whether Ziptie, 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.

Percepture, founded in 2004, is a company connected to Prime AI. Its generative engine optimization services cover the implementation when a scorecard shows pages that answers skip or misstate: content, sources and structure aimed at the sites answers cite. Its AI visibility tools guide covers the measurement that comes first. Fit: a team that wants SEO, GEO and content 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.

A documented AI visibility strategy makes either tool easier to judge.