Honest comparison · June 2026
SearchByAI vs Scrunch
Scrunch is the AI customer-experience platform that serves fixes to AI bots ($250+/mo). Here’s how the two actually differ — including where they beat us.
The short version
Scrunch is the competitor we respect most, because they share our thesis: monitoring alone is worthless — ship the fix. Their AXP serves AI-optimized versions of your pages to bots at the CDN layer, and their hallucination detection is genuinely unique. They're also $250–$500/mo, built for mid-market teams, and their loudest review complaint is weak exports. We run the same philosophy one weight class down: the fixes arrive as finished files you control.
| Scrunch | SearchByAI | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price | $300/mo monthly ($250 annual) Starter | Flat monthly plans — and the audit is free first |
| How fixes ship | AXP: CDN-layer mirrors served to AI bots (enterprise-grade, needs CDN trust) | Finished fix files you download and deploy yourself — full control, no CDN handover |
| Action layer | Page audits, recommendations, AXP | Ranked action plan, show-me-how workshops, downloadable finished fix files (llms.txt, robots.txt, schema, sitemap) |
| Proof | Agent traffic analytics + placement position | Receipts on every score (the actual stored AI answers) + daily re-checks proving movement |
| Standout feature | Hallucination detection traced to source documents | Truthful recognition scoring — echo and same-name confusion never count as 'known' |
| Built for | Mid-market marketing teams and enterprises (Lenovo, SKIMS) | Lean teams that need brand visibility fixed |
Where Scrunch genuinely wins
- AXP — actually serving the optimized version to AI bots is the most complete fix in the category.
- Hallucination detection that traces wrong AI claims to the source documents that caused them.
- Persona-based monitoring — how answers differ for different buyer types. Smart, and we don't have it yet.
Where SearchByAI wins
- Price: their floor is 3x our ceiling. Same fix-first philosophy at lean-team scale.
- Control: AXP requires routing your traffic through their CDN layer; our fixes are files you read, understand, and own.
- Funnel: a genuinely free audit with findings vs a 7-day trial into $250/mo.
- Exports and sharing: their loudest review complaint; our reports share with one link and the receipts are public-readable.
What public reviews say
- G2 reviewers (~4.6/5) praise the clean dashboard and 'explains why you're not appearing'; the most consistent complaints are weak exports/reporting and that insight-to-action still requires marketing expertise.
The bottom line
Pick Scrunch if you're mid-market, want hallucination monitoring, and are comfortable serving your site through their AXP layer. Pick SearchByAI if you want the same ship-the-fix philosophy as files you control, at a tenth of the price.
Don’t take our table’s word for it.
Check any brand free in 30 seconds — or run the full free AI visibility audit and see your score, your rivals, the actual AI answers, and your #1 fix. No card, no sales call.
Other comparisons: vs PromptMonitor · vs Otterly.AI · vs Rankscale · vs Peec AI · vs Profound
Competitor pricing and packaging verified against their public pages on June 12, 2026, and may have changed since. Spot an error? Tell us: hello@searchbyai.co.