Scrunch is the closer fit if you want AI answer monitoring tied to the site layer AI agents read, with public pricing from $250 a month. Conductor suits large teams that want AI visibility, an AI writing tool and technical monitoring under one sales-led contract with no public prices. DeepSmith is a strong alternative to both because it tracks AI answers and then writes the publish-ready articles that close the gaps, and it sends them straight to your CMS from $99 a month.
Scrunch vs Conductor looks like a choice between two enterprise AI visibility platforms, but they point in different directions once the tracking is done. Scrunch moves toward the site, with audits and an edge layer that serves lean pages to AI agents. Conductor moves toward content, with a writing tool and 24/7 monitoring, though final publishing stays in your CMS. DeepSmith sits beside both, because it tracks and then produces the finished article.
Scrunch vs Conductor: the short answer
- Choose DeepSmith if you want one self-serve plan that tracks AI answers, writes the on-brand article that fills each gap, and publishes it to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful, starting at $99 a month.
- Choose Scrunch if your main job is watching how AI agents read and cite your site, you want position and shopping tracking, and a published $250 Core price with a 7-day trial matters to you.
- Choose Conductor if you run a large, multi-site team that wants AI visibility next to keyword data, AI drafting and technical monitoring, and you can buy through a quote.
| Criterion | DeepSmith | Scrunch | Conductor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price (monthly) | $99/mo (Pro) | $250/mo (Core) | Not listed |
| Annual price | $80/mo billed yearly | Not listed | Not listed |
| Prompts at entry tier | 50 | 125 | Not listed |
| Engines at entry tier | 1 (ChatGPT) | 4 | Not listed |
| Most engines on any plan | 10 (Enterprise) | 9 (Enterprise) | 8, plan access not published |
| Free trial | 7 days | 7 days, card required | 3 weeks, no card |
| Position tracking | - | Yes | Not listed |
| AI crawler analytics | - | Yes | Yes |
| Content generation | Yes | Partial | Yes |
| Brand-context grounding | Yes | Partial | Yes |
| CMS publishing | Yes | Not listed | No |
| MCP server | Yes | Yes, Enterprise | Yes |
| SOC 2 | Yes | Yes, Type II | Yes, Type II |
| G2 rating | 4.8/5 | 4.6/5 | 4.5/5 |
Pricing and features as of September 2026, from each vendor's site and public reviews.
Scrunch
Scrunch is an AI search visibility platform founded in 2023 and acquired by Sitecore in 2026, though it still runs as its own product. It tracks prompts across up to nine engines and reports presence, position, sentiment, citations and competitor share. It is built for mid-market and enterprise marketing, SEO and web teams, plus agencies, and its pitch is that AI agents now read your site in place of people.
The standout is the site layer. Agent Traffic breaks AI bot visits into training, indexing and retrieval, Site Optimization audits pages for agent access, and the Agent Experience Platform (AXP) serves lean page versions to AI agents at the edge. Core also includes 125 prompts, five competitors and sentiment.
The limit is where the good parts sit. Core covers four engines, one country and one language. AXP, the Query API, Looker Studio and SAML sit behind a quote-based Enterprise plan. The pricing page doesn't show annual prices or overage rates, and its content generation line is described only as Basic or Advanced.
On G2, Scrunch shows 4.6/5 from 73 reviews as of September 2026. Reviewers like the ease of use and the clear view of AI search performance, and some object to engines being gated by tier.
Conductor
Conductor was founded in 2006 in New York and sells four connected products: Intelligence for AI and keyword visibility, Creator for AI-assisted drafting, Monitoring for 24/7 technical checks, and AgentStack for the MCP server, Data API and agents. It is made for large and mid-to-large enterprise SEO, content and web teams that buy through a sales-led, usage-based contract.
The standout is breadth. It tracks eight engines, with ChatGPT split into Auto and Search modes, adds fan-out queries, and ties AI referral sessions and conversions to Google Analytics 4 or Adobe Analytics. Monitoring flags AEO issues such as JavaScript rendering mismatches, and the security list includes SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and ISO 42001.
The limits are cost and clarity. Conductor publishes no prices, only yearly allowances, and seats, prompt limits and engine access per plan need a quote. AI tracking runs on credits, 2,500 a year on Essentials and Growth. The terms it publishes treat fees as noncancellable and nonrefundable, with a 90-day notice to stop a renewal.
On G2, Conductor shows 4.5/5 from 788 reviews as of September 2026. Reviewers praise support and having SEO and AI visibility in one place, and they mention a learning curve and price pressure for smaller teams.
DeepSmith: the alternative that tracks and publishes
Both platforms stop short of the last step. Scrunch spends its effort on how agents read the site, and it doesn't describe a CMS connector. Conductor's Creator writes drafts grounded in brand context, but its own FAQ says final publishing remains in your CMS, and it says people should review every draft before it goes out. That leaves your team to turn the insight into a finished page.
DeepSmith is one platform for AI search analytics and content production, so the gap it finds feeds the article it writes. It tracks mention rate, citation rate, share of voice and sentiment, shows the pages AI cites, and lists the competitor pages winning the citations you want. Opportunity Agents turn that data into content ideas, and each idea carries the data point that justifies it. The Writer then turns a planned idea into a finished article with research, internal and external links, a cover image and publish-ready metadata. Autowrite can do this on a set date with no one in the app.
Deep IQ stores your company, product, persona, voice and content-type context once, so every article is grounded in it without a fresh brief. Finished articles sit in Produced Content, where you review, edit and publish straight to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful. The Apps Library then turns each article into versions for LinkedIn, X, newsletter email, Reddit and more.
Plans are Pro at $99 a month (20 articles, 50 prompts, ChatGPT), Grow at $199 (40 articles, 100 prompts, ChatGPT and Perplexity) and Scale at $399 (90 articles, 200 prompts, Gemini added), with $80, $160 and $299 when billed yearly. Enterprise is custom and covers all ten engines. There is a 7-day free trial and no long-term contract. DeepSmith is rated 4.8/5 on G2 and is SOC 2, GDPR and ISO certified. It also has a read-only REST API and an MCP server with 23 read-only tools.
Engine coverage and tracking depth
Conductor has the wider and more configurable tracking of the two, and Scrunch has the clearer public entry tier. Conductor covers eight engines, lets you set persona, intent, location and language, and checks daily, weekly or monthly. Scrunch tracks 125 prompts on four engines at Core, with a default 72-hour refresh, and reaches nine engines only on Enterprise.
The catch with Conductor is that credits decide how much you can track. Third-party research puts the cost between 0.1 credits for a Google AI answer and 2 for ChatGPT Search or Gemini, so 2,500 credits would cover about 1,250 answers a year if you tracked only the pricier engines. Scrunch counts prompts and responses instead, 125 and 5,000 a month on Core, which is easier to plan around. Scrunch also adds position tracking (top, middle or bottom of an answer) and a Shopping module, and Conductor's record doesn't list either.
What DeepSmith does: it tracks the engines by tier, from ChatGPT on Pro to Perplexity on Grow and Gemini on Scale, and covers all ten on Enterprise. Each tracked prompt keeps its full answer history with mention and citation rates, so you can read exactly what an engine said and which pages it cited.
Agent-facing site work and technical monitoring
Scrunch wins on the layer that serves AI agents, and Conductor wins on keeping the whole site healthy. Scrunch's AXP detects AI visits and serves lean, agent-oriented versions of your pages, while humans see the normal site. Its Akamai case study reports gains from that approach, but the comparison was run by the vendor, so treat it as a lead and not a measured result. AXP is custom on Enterprise only.
Conductor takes a different route. Monitoring crawls up to 100,000 pages on Essentials and 500,000 on Growth, checks them around the clock, and ranks issues by business impact. Log file analysis separates OpenAI, Perplexity, Anthropic and Meta bots, though it is listed as Available, not included, below Enterprise. If you want to learn what the crawlers are doing before you buy, analyzing your server logs is a good first step on either platform.
Content creation
Conductor wins on content creation, because Scrunch doesn't clearly offer it. Conductor's Writing Assistant makes outlines and full drafts, scores them for intent and topical coverage, suggests internal links, and grounds them in Content Profiles and up to five knowledge sources per draft. Drafts are capped by plan, 60 a year on Essentials and 180 on Growth, which is about five and fifteen a month. Conductor says people should review every draft, and the draft ends in your CMS.
Scrunch's pricing grid lists content generation as Basic on Core and Advanced on Enterprise but doesn't say what that means, and its own comparison page says it doesn't offer AI-generated content. I wouldn't count on full articles from it. Its Content Gaps do turn a missing topic into a brief, and its page optimizer produces optimized page versions, one a month on Core.
What DeepSmith does: the Writer produces a finished article rather than a draft to rescue, with SEO and AEO structure, internal linking and metadata built in during writing. Pro includes 20 a month, so a team can publish at a steady pace without a quote. A first draft from a general chat tool has the same problem, since a ChatGPT first draft often isn't publish-ready without a lot of editing.
Pricing and value
Scrunch is easier to price, and Conductor is easier to scale into a large program. Scrunch lists Core at $250 a month with a 7-day trial that needs a card and renews to paid unless you cancel. It doesn't publish annual prices, overage terms or Agency Core limits. Conductor lists no prices at all, so you need a quote, though its 3-week trial needs no card, which gives you more time to test it.
The honest comparison is what each plan includes. Scrunch Core gives you monitoring and basic site audits and leaves AXP, the API and Looker Studio to Enterprise. Conductor's allowances are large, with 25,000 pages analyzed and 25 competitors on Growth, but the price is unknown until you ask.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith's pricing is public, and one plan covers tracking and writing together. Pro at $99 a month includes 50 tracked prompts, 20 articles and 5 seats, and Scale at $399 includes 200 prompts, 90 articles and 10 seats. Because there are no long-term contracts, you can start small and move up as the content program grows.
From insight to action
Neither platform carries an insight all the way to a published page, so this is the axis where the choice matters most. Scrunch turns data into recommendations and briefs, then delivers optimized pages to agents at the edge. Conductor turns data into recommendations that link into the Writing Assistant, and the draft goes to your CMS after review. On this axis Conductor gets closer to a finished article, and Scrunch gets closer to a changed site.
Whichever you pick, someone on your team still has to carry the work to the last step. For most teams that last step is the bottleneck, which is why turning visibility gaps into a content backlog gets so much attention.
What DeepSmith does: it closes the loop inside one platform. Opportunity Agents read your visibility data and return ideas with the evidence attached, the Writer produces the article, and Produced Content publishes it to your CMS in one action. Apps Library versions then handle distribution. DeepSmith doesn't run an edge layer for agents, and its tracking reports the pages AI actually cites while the Writer produces the pages that close the gap.
Which should you choose
- DeepSmith: a marketing lead or content team that wants tracking and publish-ready articles on one self-serve plan, with ideas backed by data and a CMS connection that skips the copy-and-paste step. It works for a single brand or for agencies running several clients, each in its own workspace.
- Scrunch: a web or SEO team that wants to watch how AI agents read and cite its site, wants position and shopping tracking, and plans to add the edge delivery layer on an Enterprise contract. If you are choosing between Scrunch or Conductor for site work, Scrunch is the more direct fit.
- Conductor: a large multi-site enterprise team that wants AI visibility, keyword data, AI drafting and always-on monitoring in one sales-led system. In a Conductor vs Scrunch decision about content, Conductor is the one that writes.
Start a DeepSmith free trial at app.deepsmith.ai and see your own tracking data and a finished article before you pay.
