Purchasing an AI visibility tool feels like progress, but it's the easy part.

Our survey of 600-plus marketing and PR professionals found that most teams have invested in AI search monitoring tools. And most get stuck the moment they need to do something with what they see.

AI search monitoring has been commoditized to a large degree. Dashboards are available seemingly everywhere, both in purpose-built tools and as add-ons to legacy software.

But the valuable part is what happens after the chart loads.

Here's why teams get stuck with their tooling, and what actually moves the needle.

Dashboards tell you what happened, not what to do

Our survey found that 73% of marketing and PR professionals have invested in tools to monitor AI visibility.

At the same time:

• 10% of respondents say they collect data but rarely act on it.
• 43% are still learning how to apply the insights.
• 59% can’t confidently interpret the data and translate it into action.

Pretty much every vendor in the AI search space—including legacy vendors trying to jump into it—can show you visibility numbers.

But a number on a screen doesn't tell you why it moved or what to do about it.

To win in AI search, you don’t just need a dashboard. You need to go from insight to action without stalling.

How it works in Scrunch

• Explorer: Scrunch lets you ask and answer any question about your AI search performance, build bespoke data visualizations, and easily share reporting with different stakeholders via our self-serve analytics surface.
• Scrunchie/Scrunch MCP: Scrunch lets you analyze your AI search data in plain language using our in-app AI chatbot or MCP. Create custom data visualizations, dig into the why behind a number, and pull reporting without any searching or clicking.
• Signals: Scrunch shows you meaningful changes in your AI search data, along with next steps and AI-assisted diagnostics. Automatically flag the shifts worth knowing about, see why they matter, get told what to do about them, and instantly investigate them with AI.

Legacy tools weren't built for this

Our survey found that while 46% of respondents are using a dedicated AI search visibility tool, many teams are relying on a hodgepodge of different technologies:

• 36% say they’re using internal/custom-built tools.
• 46% are using AI search tracking bolted on to a broader marketing platform.
• 57% are using a communications or PR platform.

Worth noting: The teams that are using a dedicated AI search tool outperformed on 25 of the 26 tactics we measured as part of our survey report.

A tool retrofitted for AI search treats it as an add-on. Its data architecture was built for something else, so the numbers may carry an asterisk, and its output may struggle to map to a clear AI-search action.

But legacy tools are only part of the problem. Even a technology built specifically for AI search will fall short if it forces users to manually dig through the data, interpret the insights, and formulate a game plan on their own.

Teams need a clear “so what” and actionable next steps.

How it works in Scrunch

• Site Optimization: Scrunch shows you a domain- and page-level breakdown of your website’s performance in AI search alongside prioritized recommendations for how to improve content consideration and selection. Get a list of the technical and editorial issues you need to fix, all ranked by impact, mapped to specific URLs, and summarized in detail by an always-on predictive model. Review and approve suggestions for each page in bulk or one by one, or set up auto-approval to ship changes automatically.
• Agent Pages: Scrunch lets you transform your AI-facing website into token-light, JavaScript-free HTML without changing the human-facing experience in any way. Automatically remove unnecessary code and fix common technical issues. Combine with Site Optimization to continually update site content based on content restructuring and enrichment recommendations week over week.

A dashboard is where the work starts, not where it ends

Monitoring gets you visibility. Closing the gap between data and action is what gets you results.

So don't just buy a dashboard. Buy intelligence: what’s happening, why, and what to do about it.

And don't just look at the numbers. Invest in tooling that helps you act on them, then measure whether the action worked.

We built Scrunch to help you close the whole loop in one place.

Observe, optimize, deliver, repeat.

Want to go deeper? Read the full survey report or check out our AI search guide.

Get started with Scrunch

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