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Scrunch Article

<hr /> “We’re turning insight into action and that action into revenue, so marketers can work at the level of their ambition.”That’s how <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-stine-ceo-sitecore/">Sitecore CEO Eric Stine</a> introduced MarketingIQ, a new module now available in its next-gen <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/shock-and-ai-awe-sitecore-unleashes-sitecoreai-its-next-gen-ai-powered-dxp">SitecoreAI platform,</a> designed to help marketers bring their ideas to life by connecting brand intelligence with AI agent orchestration.The solution was officially unveiled at <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://symposium.sitecore.com/">Sitecore Symposium 2026</a> yesterday in Orlando, a fitting backdrop as the capital of “The Experience Economy.” At last year’s event, which was held in the same location, the company made a seismic shift – ushering in a bold agentic roadmap that is now positioning it as a global leader in AI-enabled digital experience software.When it comes to change, a year might be a decade in this new era. For the first time ever, automated bot and AI agent traffic has <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/agentic-web">officially surpassed human web traffic</a>, representing a larger audience of website visitors that's only growing.At the same time, AI discovery and visibility have become hyperbolic boardroom concerns as AI answer engines like <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://chatgpt.com/">ChatGPT</a>, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://claude.ai/login">Claude</a>, and <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_Overviews">Google AI Overviews</a> represent more of the top-of-funnel consumer search behavior. The answers consumers receive are now driving decisions – and brands are often missing from the conversation. But it’s not enough to simply see or monitor what’s happening in these channels. Marketers are hungry for solutions that can help them act on those insights with greater speed and precision, and ultimately impact the bottom line. Unlocking that potential has become a serious focus for brands: according to a <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-11-09-gartner-survey-finds-42-percent-of-cmos-are-monitoring-brand-misinformation-in-ai-generated-content">recent Gartner study,</a> 61% of marketing leaders have adapted their strategies to support AI-assisted buying motions.If you’ve been following my coverage of the burgeoning categories of <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_engine_optimization">AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization),</a> it has become a noisy sector both up and downstream, with new players entering the field on a regular basis. In the race to deliver real value, vendors have been expanding their portfolios with an array of solutions, and I’ve looked at (almost) all of them. <figure class="image image_resized" style="width:89.27%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/11/scrunch-screenshot.png" /></figure>Source: Scrunch website <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/crunch-time-for-ai-visibility-sitecores-acquisition-of-scrunch-gives-brands-an-edge-beyond-aeo">Sitecore’s acquisition of Scrunch</a> back in June stands out as one of the more potent power plays. I was already keen on Scrunch’s <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://scrunch.com/platform/agent-experience/">Agent Experience Platform</a> as it was speaking the LLM love language by “scrunching” websites for AI traffic. But it was also making its intelligence more useful for marketers, providing tangible recommendations to help brands increase their visibility. There’s always been an echo of “smoke and mirrors” across the caverns of search engine marketing, and AEO and GEO have been harangued by a similar albatross. Some of the enterprise customers I've spoken to have seen mixed results from their investments. But Scrunch has garnered compelling results, where customers like <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.akamai.com/">Akamai</a> (a leading cloud and content delivery provider) have notched an impressive 364% increase in visibility across non-branded prompts.And that’s not a blip. Scrunch has delivered similar outcomes for other brands and use cases, reinforcing why Sitecore has made it central focus of its go-to-market strategy. But there’s more to this digital explosion than what we see in the surface metrics. <figure class="image image_resized" style="width:77.71%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/11/eric-chris-sitecore.jpg" /></figure>(Left to right) Sitecore CEO Eric Stine and Scrunch CEO and Cofounder Chris Andrew. Source: LinkedIn “This isn’t just about marketing, and it’s not just about technology,” Eric told me back in June. During an interview where we were joined by <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/chriswandrew/">Scrunch CEO Chris Andrew,</a> we discussed how this new platform was transforming the marketer’s toolkit and giving them a decisive edge on this new battlefield for brands – one where human judgment is playing a critical role.With so much data and decisioning, brands and teams have been saddled with cognitive overload and tightening bottlenecks. This is where MarketingIQ is making its value play as marketing that builds, runs, and improves itself – spotting opportunities, staging responses, and learning from the results. It harnesses the foundational understanding that Scrunch provides, turns it into action, and renders brand content and information readable for AI agents.“Conversational AI has redefined how customers discover information and make decisions about brands and their products and services,” Eric continued. “That’s why we brought Scrunch into Sitecore, and it’s why MarketingIQ now takes it further.”For brands to compete in this brave “New Web,” velocity is paramount. This is where platforms like Sitecore are crafting a strong position as a unified agentic ecosystem that encompasses AI discovery. MarketingIQ crystallizes this value, maintaining a source of truth for the evidence, planning, content, approvals, and measurement of visibility across the engine landscape. It also provides an authoritative system for branded content and assets for both people and agents.<h3 id="how-marketingiq-works">How MarketingIQ Works</h3><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/seasons-of-love-sitecore-symposium-2025-sings-putting-ai-and-marketers-in-the-spotlight">At last year's Symposium,</a> SitecoreAI was launched as a doorway to true one-to-one personalization, and the central hub for Sitecore’s ambitions in a world where AI engines were consuming more search traffic than ever. This new platform promised an agentic framework for automating tasks at scale, and helping marketers get real work done.MarketingIQ fits right at home in SitecoreAI, combining contextual intelligence around your brand and business with its native AI agent orchestration. That layer of agentic fuel is what powers insight into action, helping marketers identify opportunities worth pursuing, then orchestrating the entire response.With MarketingIQ, a marketer starts by identifying a specific goal or spotting a signal worth acting on. This can be a creative spark about reaching an audience, or a competitive opportunity that Scrunch surfaces. With a few simple prompts, a marketer can trigger an entire campaign, with MarketingIQ acting as a powerful lever to coordinate, execute, and ultimately learn and improve from the results.  <figure class="image image_resized" style="width:93.42%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/11/marketingiq-2.jpg" /></figure>Source: Sitecore website Because MarketingIQ connects to your broader marketing stack, it gathers brand and business context across SitecoreAI’s CMS or DAM, as well as through Scrunch, analytics, and the organization’s approved knowledge and content. This can also include key objectives and evidence about customers and previous results. MarketingIQ can decipher which facts support a claim, which audiences and products they apply to, and what content is suitable to use. <figure class="image image_resized" style="width:92.4%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/11/marketingiq-1.png" /></figure><figure class="image image_resized" style="width:92.29%"><img /></figure>Source: Sitecore website MarketingIQ then coordinates with SitecoreAI’s agents, marshaling everything from product research, brief development, relevant content, and more. It also interfaces with your brand kit and asset library to ensure that everything is on point. From there, it can assemble assets into targeted campaign deliverables like landing pages with FAQs, all designed to reach specific customers, segments, and markets – and built for AI agents. Once completed, a human marketer can review, edit, approve, and launch with confidence – and measure whether a campaign improves discovery, attracts qualified customers, or increases conversions. Sitecore employs strong guardrails, ensuring that nothing leaves a staging area without human involvement,MarketingIQ is designed as a module within SitecoreAI's native agent orchestration platform, but it can also be harnessed to your AI assistant of choice (like ChatGPT or Claude). This provides greater flexibility and control for marketers based on their goals and preferences.One other key benefit of MarketingIQ is its raw extensibility. The solution works across Sitecore and third-party CMS, DAM, CRM, or other business apps – allowing organizations to connect the content, customer data, and capabilities they already have without replacing their underlying systems.<h3 id="agentic-automation-meets-human-judgement">Agentic automation meets human judgement</h3>Let’s get down to the nuts and bolts of AEO and the intersection with Scrunch – which is where MarketingIQ has the real potential to shine.Here’s a common use case: An AI answer omits your brand or lists outdated pricing for one of your products. Scrunch surfaces the issue, but MarketingIQ can examine the brand’s approved product information and existing content, then craft and stage a proposed resolution.Once the response is approved, MarketingIQ coordinates both the people and agents needed to complete the resolution. A marketing team can then measure if the response impacts visibility and qualified traffic, and whether that traffic actually converts. Here’s one of the best parts: MarketingIQ then uses the results to inform its next recommendation and action.As pitched, it’s marketing that builds, runs, and improves itself. And that elevates the value beyond simply identifying the gaps.“It’s one thing to understand how we show up in AI-based search results, but it drives little value unless you act upon it,” said <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/pilgerstorfer/">Oliver Pilgerstorfer</a>, Chief Marketing Officer at IFS, and a Sitecore customer. “That’s the real value of MarketingIQ, which combines the insights of Scrunch with the publishing capabilities of Sitecore. Now we can act on the findings, see the work turn into qualified pipeline and, ultimately, drive revenue growth. It’s an investment in outcomes.”Like all AI tools, human judgment is an essential component – and MarketingIQ makes it a key ingredient in the recipe. Marketers set both the strategy and priorities, and make all final decisions that require any human interaction. But in between, MarketingIQ does the heavy lifting, facilitating the handoffs and routine executions that can burden teams with coordinating disconnected work.<h3 id="the-verdict">The verdict</h3>MarketingIQ just rolled out, but it is – in a word – slick. It's where all roads have been leading in the agentic transformation of digital experience tools and the intersection with search, and it squarely elevates marketers at the pivotal points in the journey. Combined with Scrunch, it completes the picture of what a next-gen marketing toolset looks like in the AI era.As Sitecore pointed out in its announcement, MarketingIQ was built in collaboration with partners that know a thing or two about marketing technology and delivery. This includes <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.perficient.com/">Perficient</a>, a leading global AI and technology consulting firm. The company is a testament to the acceleration effect of SitecoreAI, having launched its new website in just under 10 weeks by leveraging an AI-enabled experience platform.“Perficient is its own first client,” said <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/carriegrapenthin/">Carrie Grapenthin,</a> Perficient's Chief Marketing and Communications Officer. "We apply the same AI-accelerated approach to our own front office, delivery, and digital experience that we bring to clients, across the platforms they’ve already invested in.” What I like about MarketingIQ is that it meets marketers where they work, from ChatGPT to Claude to Teams to Slack. Users can work in their preferred environments, or in Sitecore, while maintaining the vital content, permissions, and approvals that their work depends on. I talk to a lot of marketers who are leaning on Claude, for example, and this reinforces the freedom to create and execute on your own terms.AI discovery is, of course, central to the value proposition – and this is where MarketingIQ is amplifying the signals from Scrunch and turning it into real action. Program pages are designed for humans, but also for agents, so you can reach both audiences. This also stacks your deck across the answer engines, improving your competitive position when it comes to critical questions and decisions. Both Scrunch and MarketingIQ are a natural evolution for Sitecore's ecosystem. At the edge, it's enabling brands and marketing teams to be more ambitious. Behind the scenes, it's providing the deep governance across content operations to coordinate the right assets and publish with control and confidence. This is where Sitecore's integrated legacy comes in, providing a secure agentic plane that is reinforced by structure around approved assets, usage rights, and custom workflows.From here, Sitecore is looking to expand the functionality of its agents, so marketers can endow them with permission to take action on a brand's website (such as requesting a demo or registering for an event). There's an implicit “trust factor” that comes with this automated horizon, but this is where a quarter-century of proven innovation and partnership comes in – and where Sitecore continues to raise the IQ for marketers and brands. <hr />MarketingIQ will be available to all customers of SitecoreAI. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.sitecore.com/marketing-iq">You can learn more here.</a>

Raise your MarketingIQ: Sitecore Combines Brand Intelligence with AI Agents to Power Marketers

matt-garrepy

<hr /> Every Thanksgiving, my father – our family’s resident storyteller and spinner of fish tales – revisits his 2011 trip to Brazil over a zesty slice of key lime pie. My favorite chapter takes place in the Amazon Basin, where he and an intrepid crew of tourists venture through the densely majestic canopy to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHayUyK-d94">Lago da Piranha</a>. This freshwater lake is a hidden gem, but it's also home to the world’s unfriendliest denizens of the deep. There’s video from the outing, and I think our paternally-carved turkey reminds him of a raw chicken being lowered into the darkly calming waters, where he and his group witness a little carnage. Tethered to some high-test fishing wire, the bird descends just below the surface of the lake. There's a scuffle. The water roils. Minutes later, the chicken is pulled back up – or what’s left of it.This snippet from <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Monsters">River Monsters </a>will give you an idea of what went down:  <figure class="media"><div data-oembed-url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21hfQYJ5mfU"><div style="position:relative;padding-bottom:100%;height:0;padding-bottom:56.2493%"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/21hfQYJ5mfU" style="position:absolute;width:100%;height:100%;top:0;left:0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe></div></div></figure> Right now, AI is eating clicks like the residents of Piranha Lake. It’s been vicious. The rise of <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://search.google/ways-to-search/ai-overviews/">Google’s AI Overviews</a> and the proliferation of <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://thedigitalbloom.com/learn/2025-organic-traffic-crisis-analysis-report/">zero-click searches</a> have decimated website traffic – and publishers have been hit the hardest by this shift.I won’t revisit all the gory details. There's plenty of data about AI answers replacing blue links and rewriting the search experience. Some sites are fighting AI companies in court, others are building partnerships and trying to adapt to the new normal. Either way, swimming in this lake is treacherous, and it feels more like treading water in a red, chum-filled sea.I just read <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/miannelli/">Michael Ianelli’s</a> dynamite article about <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://scrunch.com/blog/surviving-the-clickpocalypse-ai-eating-the-news/">surviving this “clickpocalypse,”</a> and it was every bit as harrowing as that chicken being lowered into the darkness. As the principal data scientist at <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://cmscritic.com/crunch-time-for-ai-visibility-sitecores-acquisition-of-scrunch-gives-brands-an-edge-beyond-aeo">Scrunch (now a Sitecore company),</a> he’s working on the front lines of this existential shift for brands. He and his team did a deep dive into AI’s impact on human visits to news and publishing sites, analyzing millions of events between February and June of this year. This was done via an opt-in panel connecting anonymized AI conversations, Google searches, and publisher visits.What did they find? Well, in a word, weirdness. Yes, AI is devouring traffic – ferociously. But it’s also eating clicks in one place and returning visits in another.I found this revelation compelling, but it also exposed a bigger problem for marketers: conventional analytics can identify the last stop before a visit, but not necessarily the first source of influence. In other words, we’re back to chasing the shadow of attribution.I spent time reviewing this data, and I have a few reflections on what stands out and how we might adapt to it. One thing is clear: marketers are swimming with uncertainty. And it really bites. <h3 id="crunching-the-impact-of-ai-overviews">Crunching the impact of AI Overviews</h3>One of the first revelations in the research is perhaps the most profound: news searches with an AI Overview (AIO) convert to a publisher click roughly 20% of the time, versus 30% without one. As Michael suggests, that 10-point gap is the basis for this whole “clickpocalypse” narrative.But when Scrunch compared the same query appearing with and without an AIO, the difference shrank to around two percentage points. That’s awfully close to zero. In other words, Google isn’t so much reducing the clicks as deploying AIOs in searches where they were already sparse.Some other juicy nuggets surfaced in the research. For example, across news searches, AIOs appear roughly one time in four. But with low-value "almanac" queries – commodities like weather, market prices, definitions, and explainers – it’s much higher.  <figure class="image image_resized" style="width:86.02%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/08/scrunch-3.png" /></figure>Source: Scrunch But here’s the rub: these all had relatively low CTRs to begin with. Weather, for instance, had a 59% AIO rate, but only a 13% CTR when no generative overlay was present. Interestingly, searches about war and geopolitical topics hold the middle ground. A currently popular topic like elections, for example, gets an AIO 14% of the time, with a 26% CTR. Sports is a bit more anomalous; it's an almanac entry that only gets an AIO about 5% of the time. But it also appreciates 53% of publisher clicks without an AI overlay.This can feel like a lot to process, but the through line is reasonably clear. AI Overviews can reduce clicks on an individual search, but the gap is also influenced by the kinds of queries on which Google chooses to display them. We’re strangers in a strange land. Or… a piranha-infested lake. <h3 id="ai-referral-traffic-tells-only-part-of-the-story">AI referral traffic tells only part of the story</h3>And this is an important point. According to Scrunch, only 1.1% of the news site visits that followed an AI conversation carried a direct AI referral. Meanwhile, roughly three-quarters of the traffic arrived via direct navigation, with the rest coming from traditional search and referrals. So what about that 98.9%? Is it a result of AI?  <figure class="image image_resized" style="width:85.14%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/08/scrunch-2.png" /></figure>Source: Scrunch Not so fast. Referral analytics record the immediately preceding source, but not everything that shaped the decision. AI influence can disappear when someone later searches for a brand, enters its URL, uses a bookmark, or visits through another platform. As a result, traffic influenced by AI may be incorrectly credited.This is clearly an attribution blind spot. AI referral traffic measures delivery, but it doesn’t necessarily measure influence. It’s a real hardship for publishers, as modern referral dashboards simply can’t tell you if AI shaped a later search or a direct visit. <h3 id="ai-search-may-be-feeding-an-invisible-marketing-funnel">AI search may be feeding an invisible marketing funnel</h3>While it might not be altogether shocking, Scrunch discovered that when readers engage on a news topic with an AI assistant, they visit more news sites the following week. In fact, after comparing each reader against their own behavior (news versus non-news conversations), people are 20.5 percentage points more likely to visit a news site after talking to AI about news. As Michael says, the conversational AI story isn't that AI answers have completely replaced publishers – it's that the answer often becomes one step inside a larger news journey, one that doesn’t necessarily end on the open web. The problem is that conventional analytics can’t fully visualize this. There’s a key “causality caveat” here. Someone discussing news with an AI assistant already has an implied interest in the topic, and the research doesn’t prove that AI generated entirely new demand. What it does show is that AI conversations and subsequent website activity can be connected even when referral analytics can’t see that connection. And herein lies the challenge: AI may be eating the visible click while still feeding parts of the funnel marketers can’t see.<h3 id="brand-strength-matters">Brand strength matters</h3>There are some revealing metrics in the research about which news publishers are capturing readers after an AI conversation. It’s worth perusing the associations that Scrunch uncovered – particularly where a news site is or isn’t mentioned in a prompt and whether a reader was already likely to visit that news site.What stood out for me was this: being named by AI isn’t the same as being chosen by a reader. That plays out in the data. According to Scrunch, major publishers make up 82% of the names that AI assistants deliver. 17% are mid-sized, and just 1% are niche.   <figure class="image image_resized" style="width:85.2%"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/08/scrunch-4-1786732542850.png" /></figure>Source: Scrunch But here’s the deal: of the visits that land on a named news site, 97% are major publishers. Mid-sized brands are getting decent exposure, but readers simply aren’t choosing them. A week later, those same big players see a 22.9% lift in site visits. Mid-size, a little less than 9%.Bottom line? Brand strength is the bomb. Readers are choosing news outlets they recognize or have familiarity with. Add existing preferences, perceived authority and trust, or even paywall access they’ve already procured, and major publishers win out.<h3 id="what-should-marketers-and-brands-focus-on?">What should marketers and brands focus on?</h3>Scrunch offers some sage advice for surviving this “clickpocalypse,” and it applies to publishers and non-publishers alike. As Michael observes, the general rule is that AI exposure doesn’t necessarily look like AI traffic. Write that on a Post-it and stick it to your screen. Marketers are in a bind when it comes to AI referrals and attribution. A news site or product can get mentioned or recommended in an answer, but a consumer might show up a week later through direct navigation or traditional search. We can’t count on an attribution dashboard to connect the dots. There’s no back door for controlling the answer engines. The best shot a brand has is through influence – and this is where an <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/lutzfinger/2025/06/19/answer-engine-optimization-aeo--what-brands-need-to-know/">AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)</a> platform can provide deeper intelligence. Tools like Scrunch provide detailed recommendations for enhancing answer position, but they also enable marketers to measure brand mentions, track citations, gauge sentiment, and monitor an influence score. Most importantly, they shed light on the “why” and enable marketers to take real action. If this research tells us anything, it’s that being mentioned in AI isn’t the same as being chosen. While it’s increasingly clear that <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://scrunch.com/blog/prompt-to-purchase-pipeline-how-ai-influences-buyer-behavior/">AI recommendations can have a direct impact</a> on how likely someone is to search for your products or visit your site, brand presence is the most important metric. Consumers make decisions based on credibility, reputation, and recognition across channels – so brands need to keep a watchful eye on more than AI.<h3 id="what-you-should-expect-from-your-cms">What you should expect from your CMS</h3>A big part of the AI visibility equation rests with your website’s content posture – and that waterfalls to the CMS. If it's worth its salt, your platform should help you control and maintain optimal structure and performance. In fact, some tools already provide a layer of AEO and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) readiness out of the box, helping marketers stay on point.First and foremost, audit the content in your CMS to ensure that you’ve addressed any outdated, contradictory, or incomplete information. The trouble with content debt is that it isn’t always visible, but AI has a way of finding it. The new breed of agentic CMS is making these audit sprints more efficient while streamlining the remediation.Along with governing a foundational content model and maintaining a source of truth across websites and channels, a modern CMS should allow specific content to be accessible to LLM crawlers and bots based on your internal policies (for example, gated publisher models might block certain pages). It should also support schema and machine-readable metadata without a lot of heavy lifting. Connecting your content performance with your analytics is going to be key. Some platforms have on-board visualization, but AEO platforms are aligning AI citations with the content assets that help influence them. Having this insight is becoming a non-negotiable.<h3 id="why-it-matters">Why it matters</h3>I wouldn’t recommend swimming in Lago de Piranha, but it’s comforting to know that these fish don’t generally attack humans. So we’re safe. For now.It’s true: AI is consuming traffic clean off the bone. But as Scrunch’s data points out, there’s more to the story than just a feeding frenzy. AI is shifting clicks, redistributing them based on different variables. Despite this phenomenon, AI is also driving demand – and the brands that show up in AI answers are best positioned to win.This whole chapter of AI transformation is frustrating for marketers. Yes, agents are unlocking a world of productivity. But the game has changed. While attribution has always been a challenge, we're in unknown territory, wrestling with new tools and new thinking. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://medium.com/@jane.fazackarley/heres-google-s-guidance-on-aeo-but-it-s-only-half-of-the-story-2b74275df397">Google might not be sold on AEO</a> as a separate discipline outside of search, but marketers are full speed ahead on adopting it. Whether you’re a news site or an e-commerce shop, AI needs to be able to understand you. That means getting your content house in top shape for the growing audience of agents that are visiting your site. But what people do after your brand is surfaced – whether they visit you next week or next month or via different routes – relies on your overall brand presence. That’s why building credibility, trust, and recognition in other channels is essential to surviving the “clickpocalypse.” So stay vigilant. Embrace the strategies and improve your odds. Gain actionable insight from reputable tools. And don’t get eaten. <hr /><h3 id="upcoming-events">Upcoming Events</h3> <img style="width:36.69%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/01/open-source-cms-26.jpg" /><h4 id="open-source-cms-26"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/opensourcecms26">Open Source CMS 26</a></h4>October 20–21, 2026 – Utrecht, NetherlandsJoin us for the first annual edition of our prestigious international conference dedicated to making open source CMS better. This event is already being called the “missing gathering place” for the open source CMS community – an international conference with confirmed participants from Europe and North America. Be part of a friendly mix of digital leaders from notable open source CMS projects, agencies, even a few industry analysts who get together to learn, network, and talk about what really matters when it comes to creating better open source CMS projects right now and for the foreseeable future. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/opensourcecms26/tickets">Book your tickets today.</a> <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.storyblok.com/joyconf"><img style="width:34.57%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/07/joyconf-2026-logo.png" /></a><h4 id="storyblok-joyconf-2026"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.storyblok.com/joyconf">Storyblok JoyConf 2026</a></h4>October 28 - 29, Rheingoldhalle, Mainz (Frankfurt)JoyConf 2026 is where developers, marketers, and digital innovators come together from all around the world, united by one powerful idea: great content isn’t built by tools alone – it’s built by people who rely on systems to deliver their best work to the world. In an era where technology is increasingly shaped by AI, Content Confidence becomes your competitive advantage. When you can create, manage, and scale content that performs seamlessly across channels, platforms, and AI, you don’t just keep up – you win. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.storyblok.com/joyconf">Book your seats today.</a> <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://symposium.sitecore.com/"><img style="width:36.36%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2026/07/sitecore-symposium-2026.png" /></a><h4 id="sitecore-symposium-2026"><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://symposium.sitecore.com/">Sitecore Symposium 2026</a></h4>November 10 - 12, Orlando, FloridaWelcome to “Marketing Rewired” at Sitecore Symposium 2026! Sitecore's annual flagship global conference brings together customers, partners, developers, marketers, and digital experience leaders to explore the latest innovations in digital experience, content management, AI, personalization, and customer engagement. This year's event features keynote presentations from Sitecore executives and industry experts, product announcements, hands-on learning, technical sessions, customer success stories, and networking opportunities focused on helping organizations build more intelligent, connected, and AI-powered digital experiences. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://symposium.sitecore.com/">Book your seats today.</a>

AI is eating clicks. But is it feeding the funnel?

‘Crunch Time’ for AI Visibility: Sitecore’s Acquisition of Scrunch Gives Brands an Edge Beyond AEO

Explore a wide range of informative articles on Scrunch, insights, and industry updates. Stay informed and ahead of the curve with our diverse collection of news and posts covering the latest trends and developments in the industry

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Raise your MarketingIQ: Sitecore Combines Brand Intelligence with AI Agents to Power Marketers

AI is eating clicks. But is it feeding the funnel?

‘Crunch Time’ for AI Visibility: Sitecore’s Acquisition of Scrunch Gives Brands an Edge Beyond AEO