BrightEdge adds AI search tracking to a contracted enterprise SEO platform with no public pricing or trial, so it suits teams that want classic SEO and AI answers in one sales-led system. Scrunch is built only for AI search, with a $250 per month self-serve trial and deeper answer history and fan-out tracking. DeepSmith is a strong alternative to both, because it tracks AI answers and writes the publish-ready, Deep IQ-grounded articles that close the gaps, on one self-serve plan with public prices.
If you are weighing Scrunch vs BrightEdge, you are really deciding whether AI visibility should sit inside the SEO suite you already run or in a tool built only for AI search. The two take different routes. BrightEdge is an enterprise SEO platform with AI modules added on, bought through sales. Scrunch is an AI-native platform you can start on your own. DeepSmith sits next to both as a third option, since it tracks the same AI answers and also produces the articles that fix what the tracking finds.
Scrunch vs BrightEdge: the short answer
- Choose DeepSmith if you want AI visibility tracking and publish-ready, brand-grounded articles on one self-serve plan, starting at $99 per month with a 7-day free trial and no long-term contract.
- Choose Scrunch if you want a dedicated AI search tracker you can start on your own, with a published $250 per month Core plan, answer history, query fan-out and AI agent traffic analytics.
- Choose BrightEdge if your team already works in an enterprise SEO suite and wants AI Catalyst next to keyword research, rank tracking and reporting, and you are fine buying through a sales process with no public price.
Scrunch vs BrightEdge at a glance
| Criterion | DeepSmith | Scrunch | BrightEdge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price (monthly) | $99/mo (Pro) | $250/mo (Core) | Not published |
| Annual price (per month) | $80/mo | Not published | Not published |
| Prompts at entry tier | 50 | 125 | Not published |
| Engines at entry tier | 1 (ChatGPT) | 4 | Not published |
| Most engines on any plan | 10 (Enterprise) | 9 (Enterprise) | 5 named, plan limits not published |
| Free trial | Yes, 7 days | Yes, 7 days, card required | No |
| Citation tracking | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Query fan-out | - | Yes, limited on Core | Not listed |
| Answer history | Yes | Yes | Partial |
| Full article generation | Yes | Partial | Partial |
| Brand-context grounding | Yes | Partial | Not listed |
| Publishes to a CMS | Yes | Not listed | Partial |
| SOC 2 | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| G2 rating | 4.8/5 | 4.6/5 | 4.4/5 |
Pricing and features as of September 2026, from each vendor's site and public reviews.
Scrunch
Scrunch was founded in 2023 and was acquired by Sitecore in 2026. It tracks prompts across up to nine AI platforms and reports brand presence, position, sentiment, citations and competitor share. Beyond monitoring, it offers Agent Traffic analytics, site audits with page recommendations, and the Agent Experience Platform (AXP), which serves lean page versions to AI agents at the edge. It is built for mid-market and enterprise marketing, SEO and web teams, plus agencies, that want AI answer monitoring tied to site-level work.
The standout is how much the entry plan includes. Core is $250 per month for 125 prompts, 5,000 responses a month, five competitors and five seats, with a 7-day trial that asks for a card and converts to paid unless you cancel. The real limit is the engine count. Core covers ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot, and Claude, Gemini, Google AI Mode, Meta AI and Grok are Enterprise only. AXP, the query APIs, Looker Studio and SAML sign-in also sit behind quote-based Enterprise pricing. Scrunch does not publish annual prices.
On G2, Scrunch shows 4.6/5 from 73 reviews as of September 2026. Reviewers praise ease of use and clear insight into AI search performance. Some report gaps in niche-topic coverage, tier-based feature gates, and a bit of setup friction.
BrightEdge
BrightEdge was founded in 2007 and is based in San Mateo. It sells an enterprise SEO platform covering keyword research, rank tracking, site audits, recommendations and reporting, and it has added an AI search layer on top. AI Catalyst tracks mentions, citations and sentiment across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode and Gemini, with persona testing and brief generation. AI Hyper Cube adds demand-weighted AI conversation and citation research, AI Agent Insights reports AI crawler visits, and Agent Edge serves verified agents lightweight pages at the CDN. It is built for large in-house SEO and content teams, and the agencies that serve them, who want one contracted platform with customer success support.
The standout is the breadth. Classic SEO data and AI visibility sit on the same platform, with a read-only MCP server and a REST API for your own tools. The real limit is the buying process. The pricing page is a contact form and a phone number, and BrightEdge publishes no plans, limits or trial. It also does not say whether AI Hyper Cube, AI Agent Insights and Agent Edge come with the base subscription.
On G2, BrightEdge shows 4.4/5 from 882 reviews as of September 2026, with 4.1/5 on Capterra and 7.7/10 on TrustRadius. Reviewers value the depth of keyword and ranking data and the reporting. The common complaints are high or opaque pricing, contract concerns and a steep learning curve.
DeepSmith: the alternative that tracks and writes
Both vendors track AI answers well, and both stop short of the finished article. BrightEdge's content output is briefs, draft assistance and titles, and its Publishing Agent pushes title tag, meta title and H1 updates into the CMS with a person confirming each one. Scrunch lists content generation as basic on Core and advanced on Enterprise without describing it, and its own comparison page says it does not offer AI-generated content. Neither describes storing your brand, product and voice context for the writing. For a marketing lead, that leaves the part that takes the most time, turning each gap into a page, still on your team.
DeepSmith puts both halves in one platform. The AEO module tracks mention rate, citation rate and share of voice across ten engines, with per-prompt answer history, the pages AI actually cites, and who wins the citations you want. The Content Map shows where competitors cover topics you do not, and Opportunity Agents turn those gaps into ideas that each carry the data point that justifies them. From there the Writer produces a finished article grounded in Deep IQ, which holds your company, product, persona, voice and content type context. It comes with internal and external links, a cover image and publish-ready metadata. Autowrite can run the whole thing on a schedule, and Produced Content publishes to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful, or to your own webhooks.
The terms matter as much as the features. DeepSmith has public prices: Pro is $99 per month ($80 billed annually) with 20 articles and 50 tracked prompts, Grow is $199 ($160) with 40 articles and 100 prompts, and Scale is $399 ($299) with 90 articles and 200 prompts. Engine coverage grows by plan, from ChatGPT on Pro to Perplexity on Grow and Gemini on Scale, and Enterprise covers all ten engines. There is a 7-day free trial and no long-term contract. DeepSmith is SOC 2, GDPR and ISO certified and rated 4.8/5 on G2. Its API and MCP server are read-only, so they let your tools and assistants read the workspace without changing it. DeepSmith's plans don't include crawler log analytics, so its tracking stays on the answers and the pages AI cites, and the Writer produces the pages that close the gap.
Engine coverage
Scrunch has the clearer story on engine coverage between the two. Its published entry plan covers four engines, and Enterprise covers nine, including Claude, Gemini, Google AI Mode, Meta AI and Grok. BrightEdge names five engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode and Gemini), but it does not publish which plans include which, so you cannot check coverage before talking to sales.
For a team that wants to know what it gets before a call, that gap in disclosure matters about as much as the engine count. Scrunch's per-plan engine list is on its pricing page, and BrightEdge's is not on its site.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith tracks ten engines: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Grok, Meta AI, Microsoft Copilot and DeepSeek. Coverage is published by plan, with ChatGPT on Pro, Perplexity added on Grow, Gemini added on Scale, and all ten on Enterprise, so you know what you are buying before you start.
Tracking depth and answer history
Scrunch is ahead on tracking depth. It reports where your brand sits inside an answer as top, middle or bottom, stores every collected response with its text, citations, persona and sentiment, and shows the sub-queries an engine ran, though fan-out is limited on Core and full on Enterprise. Retention is described inconsistently in its help material, so it is worth asking before you rely on a long history. Scrunch also tracks across countries and languages and has a shopping module, although on Core you get one country and one language.
BrightEdge covers the main measures well. AI Catalyst separates Mentions Presence from Citations Presence, rates each response Positive, Neutral or Negative with reasoning, and AI Hyper Cube shows every AI answer that cites a given URL. Its pages do not describe position inside an answer, query fan-out or countries and languages for AI tracking, and answer history is only partly described. BrightEdge also does not publish how it samples answers, how often, or by which method.
If you want to know how AI engines break one question into many searches, our guide to query fan-out explains why that data matters for planning content.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith keeps full answer history for every tracked prompt, with mention and citation rates per engine and the specific pages of yours that were cited. The Pages view attributes citations to each page on your site and shows the prompts driving them, so the data points you straight at the content to change.
Pricing and value
Scrunch is the one to pick on price transparency. Core is $250 per month with a card-required 7-day trial, and Agency Core is listed at $500 per month. Enterprise is quote-based, and annual prices, overage rates and agency quotas are not published.
BrightEdge publishes no prices at all. The pricing page sends you to a contact form, every product page asks for a demo, and there is no free plan or trial. Reviewers on public platforms report high or opaque pricing and contract concerns. A third-party site posts an estimate, but it is not a BrightEdge quote, so we do not treat it as a price.
The fair way to compare BrightEdge vs Scrunch on cost is by what each one replaces. If you already pay for BrightEdge's SEO platform, AI Catalyst is a module of something you have, though BrightEdge does not publish what it costs to add. If you are buying an AI tracker on its own, Scrunch gives you a number to put in a budget, which is often what settles a Scrunch or BrightEdge decision for a team without an SEO suite.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith publishes every plan, from $99 per month to $399 per month, and each one includes a fixed monthly article allowance next to the tracking allowance. You can start a 7-day trial on your own and cancel without a long-term contract or cancellation fee, so the cost of testing it is a few days of your time.
Site and agent analytics
This is where both vendors do real work beyond answer tracking. Scrunch's Agent Traffic breaks AI bot visits down by agent and by type (training, indexing or retrieval), Site Optimization audits how agents read each page, and AXP serves agent-oriented page versions at the edge on Enterprise. BrightEdge's AI Agent Insights reports visits and failures by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini agents, and Agent Edge serves verified agents a lightweight version of chosen pages from the CDN, with setup that needs CDN access and two 30-minute sessions with your IT team.
On this axis the two are close. Scrunch has the larger analytics set on its published entry tier, since Agent Traffic is included on Core. BrightEdge describes AI Agent Insights as available for enterprise customers. Both lean on a CDN integration for the deeper delivery features.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith puts its effort into what you publish. Its tracking reports the pages AI cites, Content Map gaps show where competitors cover topics you do not, and the Writer produces the pages that close the gap, so the site changes come from new content grounded in your Deep IQ.
From insight to action
Neither vendor closes this gap on its own, and BrightEdge is slightly ahead on getting changes into a CMS. Its Publishing Agent can push approved title, meta title and H1 updates into WordPress, Drupal or another major CMS, with a person confirming every change, and its Content Advisor turns prompts into briefs and checks drafts against them. Scrunch turns citation gaps into content briefs and its page optimizer produces optimized page versions, but no CMS connector is described, and Core includes one page optimization a month.
Both give you strong signals about what to fix. What each one hands you, though, is a brief or a recommendation, and somebody still has to write, link, illustrate and publish the page. If you are the person running that process, the work after the dashboard is where your week goes.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith finishes the loop. An Opportunity Agent returns ideas with the evidence attached, you plan them, and the Writer turns each one into a researched, internally and externally linked article with a cover image and metadata. Autowrite can write on the scheduled date with no one in the app, and Produced Content publishes to your CMS in one action. Repurpose then gives every finished article its social posts, ready to copy.
Which should you choose
- DeepSmith fits marketing teams that want to track AI answers and publish the content that wins them back from one self-serve plan. It suits a lean team that needs the output of an editorial process without hiring around it, and it starts at $99 per month with public prices up through Enterprise.
- Scrunch fits teams that want a dedicated AI search tracker with a published entry price, particularly mid-market and enterprise SEO and web teams, and agencies, that care about answer history, fan-out and AI agent traffic. Wider engine coverage and the agent delivery layer need Enterprise.
- BrightEdge fits large in-house SEO and content teams that already live in an enterprise SEO platform and want AI visibility under the same contract and the same customer success team. Expect to go through sales to learn what the AI modules cost.
Start a free DeepSmith trial at app.deepsmith.ai and see your own tracking data and first drafts before you pay.
