Scrunch shows the sub-queries AI engines run and attributes AI referral visits, while SE Ranking AI Visibility tracks five engines inside an SEO suite from $129 a month and offers neither. Scrunch suits teams that want that extra depth and can pay $250 a month for Core, and SE Ranking suits SEO teams that want AI tracking next to rank tracking. DeepSmith is a strong alternative for teams that want to act on the gaps, because it tracks mentions and citations and then writes and publishes the articles that close them.
Choosing between these two mostly comes down to one question, which is whether you need to see the sub-queries an AI engine runs before it answers. Scrunch vs SE Ranking AI Visibility also turns on AI referral visits, crawler data, and a price gap of $121 a month at the entry tier. SE Ranking sells AI tracking as part of an SEO platform, and Scrunch sells it as a product of its own. DeepSmith sits beside both for teams that want the gaps turned into finished articles.
Scrunch vs SE Ranking AI Visibility: the short answer
- Choose DeepSmith if you want tracking and finished articles on one self-serve plan, from $99 a month with a 7-day free trial.
- Choose Scrunch if you need sub-query, AI referral and crawler data and can pay $250 a month for Core.
- Choose SE Ranking AI Visibility if you want five-engine tracking inside an SEO suite from $129 a month, with a 14-day trial that needs no card.
| DeepSmith | Scrunch | SE Ranking AI Visibility | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price (monthly) | $99/mo (Pro) | $250/mo (Core) | $129/mo (Core suite plan) |
| Annual price | $80/mo | Not listed | $103.20/mo |
| Prompts at entry tier | 50 | 125 | 100 daily |
| Engines at entry tier | 1 | 4 | 5 |
| Most engines on any plan | 10 | 9 | 5 |
| Free trial | 7 days | 7 days, card required | 14 days, no card |
| Query fan-out | - | Yes, limited on Core | No |
| AI referral traffic | - | Yes | No |
| AI crawler analytics | - | Yes | Not listed |
| Citation tracking | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Writes full articles | Yes | Partial | Partial, suite-level |
| Publishes to a CMS | Yes | Not listed | Partial, suite-level |
| SOC 2 | Yes | Yes, Type II | Not listed |
| G2 rating | 4.8/5 | 4.6/5 | 4.7/5 (whole suite) |
Pricing and features as of September 2026, from each vendor's site and public reviews.
Scrunch
Scrunch is an AI search visibility platform that tracks how brands appear and get cited in AI answers, audits sites for AI agents, and can serve AI-optimized page versions to agents at the edge. It was founded in 2023 and was acquired by Sitecore in 2026. Its pitch is aimed at mid-market and enterprise marketing, SEO and web teams, and at agencies.
The standout is how much it measures. Core includes brand presence, position, sentiment, citations, five competitors, limited query fan-out, and Agent Traffic, which splits AI bot visits into training, indexing and retrieval. Core costs $250 a month for 125 prompts and 5,000 responses a month on four engines. The limits are real, though. Claude, Gemini, Google AI Mode, Meta AI and Grok are Enterprise only, as are the Query API, Looker Studio and the Agent Experience Platform, and annual prices are not published.
Reviewers on G2 give it 4.6/5 from 73 reviews, checked in September 2026. They praise ease of use and actionable recommendations, and some object to engines being held back for higher tiers. Capterra and TrustRadius show no reviews yet, so the independent review base is thin.
SE Ranking AI Visibility
SE Ranking is an SEO platform founded in 2013, and its AI Search Toolkit tracks how a brand is mentioned, linked and positioned in AI answers from Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. It is built for SEO teams and agencies that already run, or want, a full suite with rank tracking and audits.
The standout is that AI tracking is bundled. The Core plan at $129 a month includes 100 prompts tracked daily on five engines, ten projects and five competitor-research domains, and API and MCP access come with every plan. The limits are that Claude and Microsoft Copilot are not tracked, sentiment sits in a separate product called SE Visible, and query fan-out and GA4-based AI traffic analytics are both marked as coming soon. The packaging is also hard to read, because there are three ways to buy (suite plan, AI Search add-on, SE Visible) and they use different units.
G2 shows 4.7/5 from 1,606 reviews, but that rating covers the whole SE Ranking suite and not the AI product. AI-specific reviewers like repeatable monitoring and ask for more flexible ways to organize prompts and sources.
DeepSmith: the alternative that tracks and writes
Both tools stop at the data. Scrunch can turn a content gap into a brief, and SE Ranking suggests actions such as sources that mention competitors but not you. Neither is documented as taking you from that gap to a finished, published article tied to the tracking data. That step is where the work piles up for most marketing leads, and it is the gap DeepSmith is built to close. DeepSmith's plans don't include sub-query or crawler log views, and what they include instead is the loop from a tracked gap to a published page.
DeepSmith tracks mention rate, citation rate and share of voice, shows which of your pages AI actually cites, and ranks the competitor pages winning citations for your prompts. Opportunity Agents read that data and return content ideas, each carrying the data point that justifies it, so a backlog can be defended instead of guessed.
The Writer then turns a planned idea into a finished article that is researched, linked, grounded in Deep IQ (your stored brand, product, persona and voice context), and delivered with a cover image and publish-ready metadata. Autowrite can run that on a schedule with no one in the app, and Produced Content publishes straight to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful.
On cost, DeepSmith publishes four plans. Pro is $99 a month ($80 billed annually) with 20 articles and 50 tracked prompts on ChatGPT, Grow is $199 ($160) with 40 articles and 100 prompts on ChatGPT and Perplexity, and Scale is $399 ($299) with 90 articles and 200 prompts that add Gemini. Enterprise is custom and covers all ten engines. There is a 7-day free trial and no long-term contract, and DeepSmith is rated 4.8/5 on G2.
Engine coverage
SE Ranking AI Visibility covers more engines at the entry tier, and Scrunch covers more engines at the top tier.
SE Ranking's Core plan tracks Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, and you set country, location and language per engine, with region targeting applying to the Google engines and Gemini. Scrunch Core tracks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot, and one country, one persona and one language. Enterprise adds Claude, Gemini, Meta AI, Google AI Mode and Grok, for nine in total. SE Ranking has no plan that goes past five, and its own SE Visible FAQ says Claude is coming soon.
In practice, if your buyers use Gemini or Google AI Mode, SE Ranking covers them for less money. If you need Claude, Copilot or Grok, Scrunch is the one that can, at Enterprise pricing for most of them.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith covers ten engines in all: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Grok, Meta AI, Microsoft Copilot and DeepSeek. Coverage rises by plan, from ChatGPT on Pro to all ten on Enterprise.
Tracking depth and data method
Scrunch is the stronger option on what it measures, and SE Ranking AI Visibility is the stronger option on how often it checks.
In the Scrunch vs SE Ranking query fan-out comparison, Scrunch is the one that shows the sub-queries an engine ran. Core has it in a limited form and Enterprise has it in full, and fan-outs for ChatGPT are exposed in its responses API. SE Ranking does not show them, and SE Visible lists query fan-out analysis as coming soon. On referrals, Scrunch has an AI Referrals feature that ingests daily AI-referral events per website and provider, though it is a connection you register and send data to, and conversion attribution is not described. SE Ranking offers estimated traffic potential from AI Overviews and AI Mode, which is not measured visits, and its GA4-based AI Traffic Analytics page is labeled coming soon. On crawlers, Scrunch's Agent Traffic is included in Core and collects data through Cloudflare and Fastly integrations, a webhook, CSV import or an API. SE Ranking doesn't list crawler analytics.
On method, SE Ranking says it captures answers through the user interface as a real user would see them and checks tracked prompts daily. Scrunch says it uses a mix of browser automation and official platform APIs, collects new prompts daily for 14 days, and then refreshes by default every 72 hours, with on-demand refresh. Scrunch does not say which method applies to which engine. For history, SE Ranking's API docs say full answer text is kept for 30 days and presence metrics for one year, while Scrunch's Help Center says up to 12 months, though an older FAQ said 90 days for API access.
On SE Ranking AI Visibility vs Scrunch, the open question is whether you need to see sub-queries at all. The research I have doesn't quantify how much knowing them raises citations, so I'd treat fan-out as a planning aid. If you build content around the questions an engine breaks a prompt into, it is useful. If you mainly want to know whether you are named and cited, SE Ranking's data is enough.
Competitor and citation analysis
This one is close to a tie, because each tool is ahead in a different place.
Both record the domains and URLs that answers cite, and both show which of your own pages earn citations. SE Ranking's Sources tab counts mention opportunities and competitor-only sources, and its AI Competitor Research can look at any domain, with five domains on Core and 15 on Growth. It also tracks paid ads in ChatGPT and AI Mode answers, which Scrunch does not list. Scrunch splits citations by owner type (your brand, competitors, third party, social), allows custom citation segments, shows share of voice by platform, persona and stage, and includes sentiment on both plans. SE Ranking keeps sentiment in SE Visible.
If you work from competitor gaps, SE Ranking's source lists make that quick. If you report on how AI describes you, Scrunch has more of it in the base plan.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith ranks tracked competitors on a leaderboard, lists which exact competitor pages win citations for your prompts, and reports the sources AI cites most. Its Content Map adds the other half, showing the topics where a competitor publishes and you have little or nothing.
Pricing and value
SE Ranking AI Visibility is cheaper to start with, and Scrunch is simpler to read.
Scrunch Core is $250 a month for 125 prompts, 5,000 responses a month, one brand workspace and five seats. SE Ranking Core is $129 a month, or $103.20 billed annually, for 100 daily prompts across ten projects and one manager seat, and the price also buys the SEO suite. If you would use the rank tracking and audits anyway, that is good value. If you only want AI tracking, you are paying for a suite you may not open. SE Ranking also sells an AI Search add-on from $89 a month for 200 checks, where one check is one prompt on one engine, so one prompt on five engines uses five. SE Visible starts at $99 a month. How the add-on and the plan's daily prompts combine is not stated.
Developer access also differs. SE Ranking includes a project API, monthly Data API credits (25K on Core) and a hosted MCP server with 180+ tools on every plan. Scrunch's pricing grid shows the Query API, Looker Studio and MCP as Enterprise features, though its MCP docs say any plan can connect.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith's prices are published and include production. Each plan carries a fixed monthly article allowance next to tracked prompts, so tracking and writing sit on one self-serve plan. The REST API and the 23-tool MCP server are read-only and let you pull visibility, Content Map and content library data into your own tools.
From insight to action
SE Ranking AI Visibility has the more concrete writing tools, and Scrunch has the more direct path from AI data to page changes.
Scrunch's Content Gaps detect missing content for tracked prompts and turn a gap into a brief. Its Page Optimizer produces optimized page versions, with one page optimization a month on Core, and Enterprise can serve those versions to AI agents at the edge through its Agent Experience Platform. Its pricing grid lists basic content generation on Core, but a Scrunch comparison page says it does not offer AI-generated content, so I would ask for a demo before counting on it. SE Ranking's AI tracker suggests actions, and its suite has an AI Writer and Content Marketing tool with 25 articles on Core and 50 on Growth, though those are not part of the AI tracking product and are not tied to its AI visibility data. The suite can export content to WordPress.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith connects the steps in one system. Opportunity Agents turn a visibility gap into an evidence-backed idea, the Writer produces the article with Deep IQ context and internal and external links, and Produced Content publishes it to your CMS. The same platform then tracks whether the new page earns citations.
Which should you choose
Whether you pick Scrunch or SE Ranking AI Visibility depends on the data you will actually use, and DeepSmith is the option for teams that want to act on it.
- DeepSmith: choose it if you lead content or marketing and want one platform that finds where AI engines skip you and then produces the on-brand articles that close those gaps, with tracking and writing priced together from $99 a month.
- Scrunch: choose it if you run a team that needs sub-query, AI referral and crawler data, can budget $250 a month or an Enterprise contract, and works with the site and web teams that act on agent-facing changes.
- SE Ranking AI Visibility: choose it if you are an SEO team or agency that wants five-engine tracking next to rank tracking and audits in one suite, from $129 a month.
If you want to see how tracking and writing work together, start a free DeepSmith trial and look at your own gaps first.
