Why AI Optimization Matters
As AI-powered assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, and Meta AI rapidly become the starting point for online discovery, traditional SEO alone is no longer enough. AI platforms not only index the web - they synthesize information in real time to answer natural language questions, with context and user intent driving which brands and content appear.
In this new era of search, you’ll want to ensure your brand is visible, accurately represented, and preferred in AI-driven answers.
This guide covers a practical, step-by-step process to turn your monitoring data into actionable optimization for AI, with technical best practices and workflow suggestions.
Step 1. Start with the Data - Monitor Your Current Presence
Leverage your platform’s dashboard to understand how your brand is currently represented across major AI models. Start with what you can concretely measure. Key areas to review include:
- Visits from AI Agents/Bots: Measure how frequently your website is accessed by AI Agents and Bots. Understand the difference between AI retrieving content from your site vs indexing your site or using it for training data.
- Presence Tracking: Measure how frequently your brand is cited in response to prompts.
- Citation Tracking: Measure how frequently your website pages are cited in AI answers.
- Competitive Analysis: See which competitors or third-party sites AI is referencing instead of your content.
- Topic & Prompt Segmentation: Focus your analysis on the specific topics or product areas where you want to increase share of voice.
- AI Search Referral Traffic: How much referral traffic am I seeing from AI Search platforms like ChatGPT & Perplexity?
Pro Tip: Scrunch AI lets you filter results by persona, offering unique insight into how AI prompts and responses differ by user type - a crucial advantage as AI-generated answers become increasingly personalized.
Step 2. Define Your Strategic Focus
Use filters to zero in on how AI responds to key customer questions.
- Choose 1–2 high-priority topics where your brand should appear but isn’t consistently or prominently featured in AI responses.
- Refine with filters: Use dashboards or prompt analytics (like Scrunch AI’s “Dashboard” and “Prompts” tabs) to isolate non-branded prompts within these topics. You can also filter by platform to analyze results from specific AI models that send traffic to your site.
- Spot and fill content gaps: If a key topic shows limited or zero responses, you may be missing relevant prompts. Add custom prompts to improve coverage - tools like Scrunch’s Convert SEO Keywords or Generate with AI can help surface the prompts that matter most.
- Accuracy: Monitor key areas like pricing, product descriptions etc to understand which websites are driving answers - keep owned and 3rd party sources up to date so AI answers accurately.
- Benchmark against winners: Identify which competitor or third-party pages AI is consistently citing (via the Scrunch “Sources” tab). Scrunch ranks these by “Index” - an impact score highlighting which sources are most influential. These pages are your real benchmarks, not just the top organic SEO results.
Step 3. Reverse-Engineer What Works in AI
AI models favor content that is:
- Clear: Succinct, jargon-free explanations of what your product or service is, who it’s for, and why it matters.
- Structured: Hierarchical text (with headings, lists, FAQs) and claims that are easily parsed, with minimal reliance on visuals or interactive elements.
- Accessible: Pages and content must be accessible to AI crawlers without requiring user interaction or JavaScript to reveal the substance.
Action Steps:
- Deep dive into top-cited competitor and third-party pages (in your Scrunch “Sources” tab). Analyze how they structure content:
- Are there summary statements, taglines, or boilerplate language present (e.g., in headers or footers) that provide quick brand context?
- Are metadata (title, description) and summaries concise and informative?
- Do they have in-line questions or FAQs sections on the page?
- Is language or tone adjusted for different audiences?
- Are there examples, case studies, or testimonials that build credibility?
- Are there clear calls to action, resource links, or supporting visuals (with text alternatives)?
- Build or revise your own content to match (or exceed) these standards, using clear, direct language and plain-text summaries in metadata (Title, Description - this is important).
Step 4. Ensure AI Accessibility and Indexing
Technical accessibility is a common - and often overlooked - blocker for AI visibility. AI crawlers are not Googlebot, and most still do not execute JavaScript or render interactive/dynamic content.
Checklist:
- Bot Access: Explicitly allowlist key AI user agents in your robots.txt (e.g., ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, meta-externalagent) and configure firewalls (like Cloudflare) to let them through. Overly restrictive bot-blocking is the #1 issue that prevents your pages from being cited by AI assistants - even if you rank organically (more on AI user-agents here).
- Check Web Logs: Verify that these AI user agents are actually visiting your site. Tools like Scrunch’s Bot Traffic feature can automatically track which AI crawlers are accessing your pages and what content they’re retrieving. This helps confirm your allowlisting is working and surfaces any missed technical barriers early.
- No JavaScript Requirement: Make sure important content is visible and readable with JavaScript disabled.
- Right Content Length: Avoid pages that are too thin (not enough text) or excessively long (within AI context limits). Aim for the “middle ground” - think clear blog posts, detailed FAQs, and concise product descriptions.
- Text over Schema: Structured data helps SEO, but AI is still driven primarily by on-page text. Don’t rely on schema alone for AIO success.
Test It:
- Use browser “Reader Mode” or Scrunch’s Site Audit to see your page as AI would.
- Use prompt monitoring and site audit features to verify that the AI crawlers can actually access your latest content.
Step 5. Publish, Measure, and Iterate
AI responses are dynamic. Even after optimizing content and access, ongoing monitoring is required:
- Track presence, citations, and sentiment: Is your brand being mentioned and linked in response to key prompts? Are you closing the gap with competitors? What is AI’s sentiment around your brand?
- Dashboard metrics like Scrunch’s “Competitive Presence,” “Citation Rate,” and “Sentiment” provide this at a glance.
- Run site audits: Regularly audit new or updated pages for AI-friendliness before and after publishing.
- Monitor shifts in AI traffic: Use analytics integrations (like Scrunch’s GA4-based AI Traffic tab) to see if AI platforms are actually driving users to your site.
- Respond to insights: Take advantage of the automatic recommendations in your platform to identify which technical or content gaps should be addressed as they’re flagged.
Why Scrunch for AI Monitoring and Optimization?
While many AIO/GEO tools can track generic prompts and competitive citations, Scrunch is fully customizable to your brand and purpose-built to accelerate optimization in the largest AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and AI Overviews:
Unified Workflow: Scrunch connects monitoring, technical audits, competitive benchmarking, and automated insights in a single platform.
Persona and Prompt Intelligence: Scrunch uniquely supports persona and geography-based tracking and automatically generates relevant prompts for each segment. Meaning brands ranging from local businesses to global enterprises can fine-tune their approach to monitoring AI search.
Customization: Scrunch allows you to easily define and adjust custom personas, prompts, key topics, and even geographies most relevant to your brand, giving you full control over what you’re tracking.
Actionable Audits: Scrunch’s Site Audit and Insights tools reveal hidden barriers to AI visibility and recommendations actions - before they cost you real exposure.
Competitive Benchmarking: Scrunch pinpoints which competitor and third-party URLs are most influential in AI responses. You can benchmark your brand’s performance, identify what’s working for others, and adapt your own content and strategy faster and more effectively.
Scrunch’s specialized features and holistic view of AI visibility can give your brand a lasting edge as search and shopping shift towards AI.
Summary Checklist for AI/GEO Optimization
- Identify key topics and personas - track competitive presence in AI responses
- Analyze and mimic top-cited content structure, tone and messaging
- Allowlist all relevant AI user agents and ensure no technical barriers
- Pre-render all important content and minimize JavaScript dependence
- Ensure meta titles and descriptions accurately describe the page content
- Prioritize readable, succinct, text-based content
- Continuously audit and iterate using monitoring and site audit tools
- Use traffic and citation dashboards to validate real-world improvement
For more detailed guides, visit Scrunch AI’s Resource Library.
The rules of search are changing. With Scrunch, you have the tools to not only keep up but lead!