Monitoring AI-answer presence versus verifying crawler access
Scrunch AI and AI Crawl Score both describe their category as AI search readiness, but Scrunch is a paid platform that monitors and optimizes brand presence inside AI-generated answers, while AI Crawl Score is a free scan that checks whether a site’s pages are technically reachable in the first place.
What Scrunch AI does
Per Scrunch’s own pricing page, the product is sold on a Core plan at $250/month (125 tracked prompts across four AI engines, five site audits/month, five user licenses, one brand workspace, 7-day free trial) and an Enterprise tier with the full set of nine tracked engines, an Agent Experience Platform, API access and SSO; agencies have a separate Agency Core plan at $500/month. Its stated workflow covers monitoring brand/competitor presence, position, sentiment and citations across AI platforms, site- and page-level audits identifying access-control or content-quality gaps that block citations, and AI-assisted content optimization.
What AI Crawl Score does
AI Crawl Score’s free readiness checker does not track brand sentiment, citations, or prompt-level AI-platform presence. It runs a single bounded raw-fetch scan of up to five pages per run, reporting robots.txt rules by crawler identity, sitemap presence, JSON-LD structured data, and delivered-content accuracy, with no account or credit allocation required.
Side by side
| Question | AI Crawl Score | Scrunch AI |
|---|---|---|
| AI-answer brand/sentiment/citation tracking | No | Yes |
| Prompt-based monitoring across AI engines | No | Yes, 4–9 engines by tier |
| Robots/sitemap/schema technical check (free) | Yes | Bundled in paid site audits only |
| Pricing | Free | From $250/month |
| Setup | None | Account, brand workspace |
Which one fits your situation
Use AI Crawl Score for a free, immediate check of whether specific pages are crawlable and carrying valid structured data. Use Scrunch AI when the ongoing need is tracking and improving how a brand is represented, cited and positioned across multiple AI assistants over time, a materially different and more expensive undertaking. Scrunch’s own page-level audits reportedly flag access-control gaps that block citations, which overlaps conceptually with what AI Crawl Score checks for free, but Scrunch’s broader monitoring and optimization workflow is outside AI Crawl Score’s scope. Google’s AI-optimization guidance still treats basic crawler access as a prerequisite to any AI-visibility program.
See enterprise ai crawler governance, ai citation tracking methodology, and crawl budget for ai bots.
Frequently asked questions
Does AI Crawl Score track brand sentiment or citations across AI platforms like Scrunch?
No. AI Crawl Score only reports technical crawler-access findings for a bounded page sample; it has no sentiment or citation-tracking feature.
Is there a free way to get the access-control audit findings from Scrunch?
The pricing page of Scrunch offers a 7-day free trial of its Core plan, not a permanently free tier; the robots/sitemap/schema checks in AI Crawl Score are free indefinitely but are not identical in scope to the paid site audit in Scrunch.