Do you know? Search engines never had a traffic drop in last 20 years, but now first time in history, Search engines are seeing traffic drop.
Back in February 2024, Gartner published a prediction that quietly rattled the marketing world: by 2026, traditional search engine volume would drop 25%, with search marketing losing ground to AI chatbots and virtual agents, Generative AI was becoming a substitute for the search query itself, not just a new feature bolted onto it.
25% is not a small number. A 25% contraction in the channel that most B2B and B2C marketing strategies were built around, in a window of roughly two years.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince expected the crossover by the end of 2027. It arrived in June 2026.
We've lived through this kind of shift before
Think back to the dot-com boom. The internet flooded with websites and experiences, all built for one audience: humans, clicking, scrolling, reading. That was the paradigm for thirty years.
Now ask the uncomfortable question: what happens if your experience — no matter how brilliant the content, how polished the design, how strong the brand — simply stops getting that traffic? Not because it's bad. Because the audience reading it has quietly changed from people to machines acting on people's behalf.
That's not a marginal shift. That's the kind of shift that means your entire marketing ecosystem — built for human eyes over the last two decades — may need to be rewritten from the content layer up.
Old friends are getting new neighbors
We all used robots.txt from years, It has quietly governed how search engines crawl the web for about thirty years. In September 2024, AI researcher Jeremy Howard proposed a new file to sit alongside it: llms.txt. Its entire purpose is different from robots.txt, It doesn't tell bots where they can't go, it tells them where the content that actually matters lives, stripped of navigation, ads, and JavaScript that AI models don't need and can't easily parse.
SEO too, Nearly every marketer has lived and breathed this discipline for years, now has new siblings: AEO, Answer Engine Optimization, and GEO, Generative Engine Optimization. Different mechanics, different signals, same underlying question: will your brand be the one an AI system cites when someone asks it a question your competitors also want to answer?
You can love this shift or resist it. You cannot ignore it. We're sitting at the exact intersection of the change. The real question isn't whether it's happening, it's whether you're ready for it.
Why the Scrunch acquisition is the important part of this story
This is exactly the gap Sitecore just spent real money to close. Sitecore's CEO Eric Stine framed the rationale directly that buyers are now consulting large language models ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini about products and vendors before they ever reach a company's website, and by the time they arrive, if they arrive at all, their opinion is often already formed.
Scrunch's co-founder Chris Andrew has described the company's founding bet, made back in 2023, in a single sentence worth sitting with: that the most important visitor to a website would eventually not be a person, but an AI agent acting on that person's behalf. Two years later, that bet looks less like a gamble and more like a forecast that arrived early.
This is why the acquisition matters to every Sitecore partner, customer, and brand they represent, Not because it adds another logo to the marketplace, but because it's aimed squarely at helping brands show up and get cited in an era where ChatGPT and Claude are becoming primary visitors to their sites, not secondary crawlers.
What Scrunch actually does, and why the name fits
Here's the simplest way I can describe it: Scrunch, quite literally, scrunches your website or a page.
AI doesn't need the fancy design, the hero images, the animation, the layout choices your team debated for weeks. It needs the content that actually matters which can be clearly stated, easy to parse, free of the visual noise built for human persuasion. So Scrunch's Agent Experience Platform (AXP) creates an alternate, lightweight version of your page, Think of it as a "Human View" and an "AI View" running in parallel. It scrunches the page down, in the literal sense of the word, to just what a model needs to understand and cite it accurately, without touching the experience your human visitors actually see.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like on the surface. The compute cost or the "budget" a bot spends crawling and interpreting a page to process your full, heavy webpage versus your scrunched version is dramatically lower. Which means your value proposition, from an AI system's perspective, is dramatically higher. You're not just easier to find. You're cheaper for AI to read. And cheaper-to-read, well-structured content is exactly what gets selected and cited.
In a study with Akamai, pages enabled with Scrunch's AXP saw a 364% increase in brand presence for non-branded AI prompts and a 218% increase in citations across AI-generated results. In a separate case, Runpod used the platform to identify indexing and rendering issues limiting its AI discoverability, and reported a 400% increase in paying customers tied to that work.
The bottleneck every marketer already feels
Talk to almost any CMO or marketer right now and you'll hear the same thing, in slightly different words. They know AI is here. They know people are asking ChatGPT which product to buy, and that their competitors are the ones showing up in that answer. They know they should be optimizing for AEO and GEO.
What they don't have is the tool, the guide, or a clear picture of how to look at their own content the way an AI system does.
And that's the real bottleneck. If you don't know the intent of who or what is visiting your site, and you don't have a feedback loop telling you what content is actually working versus what's just sitting there unread, you can't make the decisions that matter like how to build your asset library, what content should power which campaign, how to build genuinely personalized journeys. It all comes back to one question, Who's visiting your site, and what do they actually want?
That's the gap Scrunch is built to close giving brands a map of who their visitors really are, human and machine, and the tooling to close the distance between the content they already have and what these next-generation AI engines need in order to cite them instead of the competitor.
Conclusion
Your competitors are getting ready to be cited in LLMs, are you ready too? If not that's exactly the conversation worth having next.
Be cited. Not just searched ;-) Cheers !!!