Scrunch vs. Profound: What users say

Intro

I don’t like the idea of compete pages.

You know, the type where:

• Your brand is positioned as the clear winner.

• Selected features for comparison tables are cherry-picked in your favor.

• Every box on your side is green; theirs, not so much.

Such competitive comparisons are dripping with bias. The domain they’re hosted on, the employer of the author (better check this one!), or the footer of the deck tell the reader all they need to know.

Plus, even if accurate, they pretty much go out of date the moment they’re published.

Yes, competitors can ship features, too. When they do, and your artifact doesn’t reflect it, buyer’s notice—and that’s when trust is eroded.

AI search is a crowded space. Multiply dozens of features by dozens of competitors and you’ve got a lot to keep tabs on (even if AI is doing some of the work). Not only that, I find it pretty hard to accurately evaluate the quality of a feature without actually using it.

Not exactly how I want to be spending my time.

So instead of building another biased, soon-to-be-outdated product versus product page, I’m trying a different (and hopefully more durable) approach.

No tables. No green checkmarks. No feature arms race.

Just the themes we hear about when our customers and the broader market compare Scrunch to Profound.

Here are the patterns (and the receipts) 👇

Why choose Scrunch over Profound? What users say:

Scrunch offers faster time to value

While we haven’t perfected our onboarding experience, we’ve tried to make it as fast, intuitive, and accessible as possible.

For AI search monitoring to be insightful, a lot of context needs to be provided at setup—think competitor selection, persona context, topic groupings, regional focus, etc.

We’ve taken the analysis paralysis out of configuration.

All that’s needed to set up a workspace is a URL. From there, we’ll fetch the details of your brand, ideal personas, competitors, and topics to track.

I’m always shocked at how accurate the returned results are. And, when they aren’t (e.g., a competitor was missed or a persona is off the mark), it’s super easy to add or edit the details on the fly.

Then there’s prompt selection: What prompts should I track? How many should I start with?

Prompts are the essential piece to any AI search strategy. Without them, an AI search product like Scrunch is pretty much useless.

And that’s why we’ve made adding prompts to track dead simple—literally just click a button to Generate Prompts.

Again, I’m often surprised by how solid the prompt selection is when generating with AI. And again, if it’s off, changing a prompt or selecting what models to track is all customizable.

In addition to generating prompts with AI, there’s also options to convert keywords, add custom prompts in bulk, and import via CSV (for more advanced users).

2-time SaaS CMO, Lari Numminen, conducted an extensive review of AI visibility tools, which scored Scrunch as a tie for the top spot (Writesonic was the tie, not Profound).

In his deeper dive on Scrunch, he highlighted the following:

“The main advantages include quick onboarding with guided setup for prompts, competitors, and brand configuration, intuitive navigation with clear dashboards for tracking brand presence across AI platforms.”

Granular, self-serve control over topics, personas & tags

While both Scrunch and Profound offer tracking on contextual dimensions like topics, personas, and tags, we tilt in different directions when it comes to usability, with:

Scrunch leaning toward more control: Users define structure, segmentation, and context (e.g., add custom prompts for an upcoming campaign and tag them with a bespoke name)

Profound leaning more toward automation: automated topic clustering, templates, and performance analysis

With Scrunch, you own the taxonomy.

At onboarding, we give you a head start with some automation. But after that, you’re in full control over the topics, tags, competitors, personas, models, funnel stages, and regions to focus on.

From there, you can use any of those dimensions as filters across prompts (and prompt position), citations, and sentiment.

In an early Scrunch review on Rankability, users noted preferring Scrunch because:

Deep filtering & persona prompts let teams slice data by customer segment, campaign, or geographic market quickly

The ability to control and self-serve several custom dimensions (think custom prompt tagging or topic clustering) is especially useful at enterprise scale. Multiple product lines, web properties, operating regions, and so on, are a given in the enterprise.

Without full control over how prompts are organized (e.g., by tag, by topic, by persona, by funnel stage), growing brand reach on AI platforms becomes untenable at scale.

Drill-down-ability

One other difference we hear (which doesn’t often show in feature comparison tables) is our drill-down-ability. That is, what you see after you click into the details of a prompt or a citation.

What’s surfaced is a level granular than other products on the market. We don’t just stop at “you’re trending up” or “you’re trending down.” With Scrunch, you can click into the details and move from prompt topic → specific prompt → prompt by model → daily performance trends as you keep clicking.

We think it’s best put by this Reddit user:

“Profound looks good on paper, but once we dug in, we weren’t convinced it could actually do what the pitch deck promised. The insights felt high-level, almost like an AI-generated report of what should matter, not what was actually happening in the results. Hard to take action on that.”

“Scrunch, on the other hand, gave us real, source-level transparency. We could literally see which exact pieces of content LLMs were pulling from, whether it was our clients’ sites, third-party listings, or even competitors. That made it crystal clear what to optimize, and we saw AI visibility gains within weeks, not quarters.”

In a similar vein, back to Lari Numminen’s Scrunch review, which calls out “excellent filtering” and the ability to drill down by topic, persona, stage, model, and custom tags as a strength of Scrunch.

Just as importantly, he notes that our UI makes it easy to see where you’re missing citations or where competitors show up instead for maximum actionability.

The bigger picture: Where Scrunch and Profound will diverge

In all honesty, like a feature comparison table, the differences between Scrunch and Profound above are subject to change.

Both of us are growing fast. Both of us are shipping features fast. Both of us have an avid customer base. And, in many ways, preference is in the eye of the beholder.

But…there’s one big area where Scrunch and Profound will diverge: product vision and strategy.

Your website traffic is going away (and it’s not a bad thing)

I can’t speak for Profound, but our vision at Scrunch (and prediction for the market direction) is that AI web traffic will surpass human traffic. Not only that, agent traffic will be high value as it works on behalf of a human prompting it.

In other words, AI agents crawling and retrieving data from our sites will become the new high-value visits we optimize our sites for.

Today, our websites are not optimized for agent traffic. They’re filled with javascript, images, videos, animations—good for humans; not for AI.

And that’s exactly why we built AXP (Agent Experience Platform): Identify AI visits and serve a parallel version of your site that’s optimized for agent traffic—all while keeping the human UX optimized for, well, humans.

As AI becomes more and more of a fixture of your web traffic, Scrunch gives you control over how agents consume your content. That way, when they return an answer to your customer, it’s accurate, contextual, and complete.

The other bet: Workflows and content generation

Profound (and other competitors in the market) seem to be making a bet on AI workflows to generate content.

The premise is simple: Identify content gaps in search and generate content to fill said gap.

While this can work in the short term, we don’t see it as a winning approach in the long term due to what’s known as model collapse.

Think of model collapse as a snake eating its tail: When exposed to its own outputs, studies show that models degrade in diversity, accuracy, and coherence.

LLMs are well aware of model collapse. And, because their business model depends on it not infiltrating their model, we don’t think they'll give authority to AI-generated content in the long run.

Not unless it’s either heavily edited by a human or uses bespoke inputs (think using an API from your product data), that is.

In other words, LLMs won’t reward content slop.

Don’t take our word for it

This post is biased—just look at the author behind it.

Which product is best for you? Only one way to find out.

Put Scrunch to the test. Put Profound to the test. Put others to the test.

And when you do, be sure to verify that your AI search solution of choice can do these four things:

1️⃣ Create a brand on the fly: Provide a brand (yours, a competitor’s, a brand you love) and make sure setting up prompts can be done in the time of a 10-minute demo.

2️⃣ Create and monitor custom prompts: Many vendors choose the prompts and categories for you. If you need the flexibility to create and monitor your own custom prompts (most do), be sure that it can be done in a self-serve way.

3️⃣ Data config and extensibility: You’ll likely need to configure, drill down, and report on data in the way you need (e.g., find top citations in North America for bottom-of-funnel prompts). Not only that, verify that you can export and share reports as well. And if you need data via API, be sure to ask about that, too.

4️⃣ Enterprise checkboxes: If you have enterprise-like requirements—SOC2 Type II, role-based access control (RBAC), API extensibility, multi-brand management, scale of prompts to track—be sure to ask and verify them up front.

See Scrunch for yourself

Get in touch to see how you can optimize your brand for the AI-first customer journey or sign up for a free 7-day trial.