Scrunch: Rewriting the Web for AI

We are excited to announce our investment in Scrunch AI, a rapidly growing startup that dynamically rewrites web content to be optimal for AI searches. Traditional web search is on the decline as internet use shifts from traditional browsers to AI-driven interfaces, creating a huge challenge for websites not built for today’s LLM-driven world. AI agents don’t "browse"— they want content they can easily query and chunk in order to generate responses in products like ChatGPT and Perplexity. Scrunch makes it easy to deliver compressed, structured content specifically for AI agents and crawlers in real-time, giving every website or content creator the opportunity to measure and improve their content in AI-driven searches. Scrunch is used by over 500 customers and is demonstrating immediate ROI, increasing visibility in AI searches by 4x once deployed.

Scrunch was co-founded by Chris Andrew and Robert MacCloy, both part of the early founding team at Hearsay, where they served as CPO and CTO, respectively. They shared their vision for content publishing in the era of AI agents in our founder Q&A:

How did you guys meet? What was the genesis of Scrunch AI?

We both grew up in small towns where our parents were entrepreneurs and small business owners. They inspired us to pursue careers in the tech industry, and we were both fortunate to be part of the founding team at Hearsay Systems. Our company was at the forefront of the shift from web content to social media, helping enterprises and brands engage with customers on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Bridging the gap between traditional enterprise marketing and new digital channels was a complex challenge - we had to build a solution that enabled brands to centralize their guidelines and rules while enabling individuals to publish social content in a more personalized way. We saw firsthand how the right platform could accelerate engagement and allow large brands to cross the chasm. Marketers must follow the user and meet them where they are: first, they were browsing, then searching, and finally socializing. Now they want to use AI, and we were the right team to build Scrunch to help customers capitalize on this paradigm shift.

The content landscape is shifting dramatically—what's the big deal with agentic search?

For the past 30 years, since the Netscape browser, we have been creating a human-readable internet that was designed for searching and browsing. AI products don’t browse or search like humans - they retrieve incredibly large amounts of data, store them in unique data formats, create vectorized embeddings, and generate output. They don’t really see the great user experiences we’ve built, nor do they care for the “window dressing.” Traditional SEO optimizes for rankings and clicks, but agents prioritize parsable content with an optimized data structure and relevance to their generated answers. There are many studies that suggest that 40% of web searches are now “zero-click”, meaning that users never go to an underlying web page and instead trust the answer within the AI-generated responses. Over 75% of Fortune 1000 websites are not easily crawled by AI agents - those that don't adapt risk invisibility, while those who do can gain share of voice. We have already seen visibility increase 4x in AI searches when our product is deployed.

What problem is Scrunch AI solving, and how does it enable brands to understand and enhance their content's role in AI-based search? 

Scrunch tackles the black box of AI for marketers so they can continue to innovate without needing to become technical AI experts. Content creators generally focus on content that's perfect for the traditional web but is surprisingly indecipherable to AI agents. Scrunch analyzes tens of millions of prompts across leading platforms, revealing how LLMs select and rank content based on structure, context, and relevance. We track how your content is pulled into AI answers, benchmark against rivals, and show you the levers that will boost performance. For example, many websites would benefit from adding numerous pages with properly parsed and chunked content ideal for LLM indexing and AI-generated responses. The possibilities are transformative—it empowers entirely new strategies, such as fine-tuning content for "share of response" in AI prompts and redirecting budget from old SEO to AI-first, dynamic token publishing. Some customers have seen 40% higher conversion, AI-driven and meaningful ROI from using our tool, and we are just getting started.

How do you "scrunch" content for the AI agent web? What is your unique IP? 

"Scrunching" is our way of compressing, distilling, and optimizing content into a format agents crave—structured, concise, context—without touching your human site. The opportunity stems from AI's unique parsing: LLMs don't interact with the web like humans; they ingest and reason, favoring content with clear hierarchies, semantic markup, and traceable data. We've built a unique and proprietary blueprint from real-world data on how millions of small changes in machine-readable content can amplify impact in AI searches, and then dynamically reauthor your site to optimize your results. Our platform makes this entire experience seamless: we monitor in real time how your content is performing in searches, build a machine-readable version of your brand, and leave your website unchanged. We also have a unique and longstanding experience in the enterprise, ensuring your content meets the accuracy, explainability, and compliance requirements in the most demanding environments. 

What's the long-term vision for Scrunch AI?

The AI era is creating two parallel versions of the internet —one designed for human engagement, the other optimized for AI agents that autonomously navigate, reason, and act on our behalf. Scrunch is already empowering agents to discover and surface high-quality content with machine-optimized precision; tomorrow, we'll expand to tools that assign agents unique identities, persist their preferences across interactions, and enable them to transact just like humans—unlocking entirely new avenues for commerce and discovery on the Internet. Our goal is to be the leading end-to-end platform crafting these agentic parallel experiences, and to help every business embrace this new frontier as quickly as possible.

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