As businesses adjust to the new AEO landscape, marketers are seeing increasing convergence with marketing automation—HubSpot’s recent acquisition of Xfunnel signals this shift, bringing AI search optimization directly into the CRM ecosystem where attribution and revenue tracking happen.

As a result, Marketers need the right AEO tools to reach their audience, who are flocking to AI search engines in droves. Two platforms gaining traction are Profound and Scrunch for AEO.

Both platforms boast useful tools meant to boost discoverability and reach, but which between the two is best for your business? Keep reading for a breakdown of Profound vs Scrunch for AEO and to see which would work best for you.

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Table of Contents

What is Profound?

Profound is an enterprise-grade Answer Engine Optimization platform that helps brands boost discoverability across AI-powered search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews

Profound combines comprehensive monitoring across 9+ AI engines with powerful content creation tools called Agents that enable teams to produce AI-optimized content at scale.

My research shows Profound is particularly known for its Prompt Volumes feature—the first tool to reveal actual search volume data for AI conversations—and its specialized ChatGPT Shopping optimization capabilities for e-commerce brands.

screenshot of profound ai landing page

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What is Scrunch?

Scrunch is an AI Customer Experience Platform that focuses on technical optimization and helping brands control how AI agents interpret and cite their content. Rather than emphasizing content creation, Scrunch identifies technical barriers that prevent AI crawlers from accessing your site, analyzing which sources AI engines prefer to cite, and providing actionable recommendations to improve visibility.

My favorite, and a fan favorite, feature is its Agent Experience Platform (AXP), which creates parallel, AI-optimized versions of your web pages specifically designed for AI consumption—dramatically improving how effectively AI systems can process and reference your content.

screenshot of scrunch ai landing page

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Profound vs Scrunch for AEO: Comparison at a glance

Here’s a high-level comparison I put together to help you quickly understand how Scrunch and Profound differ:

Profound

  • Primary Strength: Content creation and production at scale
  • Best For: Enterprise brands needing to generate high volumes of AI-optimized content
  • Standout Features:
  • Agents tool with dozens of AI-optimized content templates (listicles, how-tos, comparisons)
  • Prompt Volumes showing actual AI search demand by topic
  • ChatGPT Shopping optimization for e-commerce brands
  • Monitoring across 9+ AI engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Copilot, Meta AI, DeepSeek, Google AI Overviews)
  • Implementation Timeline: 4-6 weeks to first visibility improvements
  • Pricing Model: $99/month for Starter tier; $399/month for Growth tier; Custom Enterprise pricing
  • Ideal Customer: Large marketing teams with content production bottlenecks, e-commerce brands, and companies needing prompt volume forecasting
  • Integration Approach: Custom enterprise integrations with your content stack

Scrunch

  • Primary Strength: Technical optimization and AI agent experience
  • Best For: Organizations with strong existing content that needs technical optimization
  • Standout Features:
  • Agent Experience Platform (AXP) is creating AI-optimized parallel versions of web pages
  • Real-time error detection identifying AI crawler issues
  • Citation analysis revealing which sources AI prefers
  • Data API for seamless CRM and analytics integration
  • Performance tracking by persona, topic, and geography
  • Implementation Timeline: 2-4 weeks to first technical improvements
  • Pricing Model: For brands, $250/month for the Core tier and custom pricing for the Enterprise tier. For agencies, $500/month for the Core tier and custom pricing for the Enterprise tier.
  • Ideal Customer: Technical teams, companies with developer resources, brands prioritizing ROI efficiency and CRM integration
  • Integration Approach: Robust Data API enabling custom integrations with HubSpot, Salesforce, and BI tools

Key Differentiators at a Glance

Feature

Profound

Scrunch

Content Creation

✅ Extensive (Agents tool)

⚠️ Limited focus

Technical Optimization

⚠️ Basic (Agent Analytics)

✅ Advanced (AXP + error detection)

Search Volume Data

✅ Prompt Volumes

❌ Not available

CRM Integration

⚠️ Custom work required

✅ Data API provided

Free Trial

❌ No

✅ 7-day trial

E-commerce Features

✅ ChatGPT Shopping

⚠️ Limited

Implementation Speed

4-6 weeks

2-4 weeks

Best for Budget

Enterprise

Mid-market to enterprise

Profound vs Scrunch compared

Now, walk with me as we dive deep into how these platforms stack up across the features that matter most to marketing and SEO professionals.

AI Visibility Monitoring & Dashboards

Profound’s Approach: Profound’s Answer Engine Insights dashboard serves as the central hub for tracking brand visibility. The platform displays a primary visibility score that trends over time, allowing you to see performance across 7-day, 30-day, or custom periods.

The dashboard includes competitive benchmarking that shows your brand’s industry ranking alongside direct competitors, with weekly performance trends for each company. Users can filter visibility data by AI model or region, making it easy to understand where your brand performs strongest.

The platform stores screenshots of AI responses for audit trails and verification, which is valuable for proving citation patterns to stakeholders.

Scrunch’s Approach: Scrunch organizes its monitoring around a clean, modern dashboard that emphasizes prompt-level analysis. Rather than a single visibility score, Scrunch shows mention frequency, share-of-voice percentages, and sentiment analysis for each tracked prompt.

The platform excels at competitive benchmarking by displaying competitor mentions alongside AI responses, enabling direct, side-by-side comparison.

One standout feature is Scrunch’s real-time AI crawler feed, which shows exactly when AI bots visit your site, which pages they access, and traffic trends over time. This granular visibility helps technical teams identify crawling issues before they impact visibility.

The platform also offers robust filtering by topic, persona, funnel stage, AI model, and custom tags—making it highly flexible for organizations with diverse tracking needs.

Winner for Monitoring: Scrunch edges ahead for teams needing granular, prompt-level insights and real-time crawler monitoring. Profound wins for enterprise teams wanting executive-friendly visibility, scoring, and comprehensive screenshot documentation.

Prompt Analytics & Search Volume Data

Profound’s Approach: Profound‘s Prompt Volumes feature is genuinely revolutionary—it’s the first platform to reveal actual search volume data for AI conversations.

Similar to how Google Keyword Planner shows monthly search volumes, Prompt Volumes displays how frequently topics are discussed across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, and other platforms.

Prompt Volumes enables traditional SEO-style content planning, allowing you to prioritize topics based on demand rather than guesswork.

The Conversation Explorer lets you drill into specific prompts to see precisely how AI engines respond, with full-text extraction and context around your brand mentions. Users can customize prompts, disable irrelevant ones, or add their own queries to track.

This flexibility is essential for aligning monitoring with your specific brand strategy and messaging priorities.

Scrunch’s Approach: Scrunch takes a different approach to prompt analytics. Rather than providing volume estimates, the platform converts your keywords into synthetic tracking prompts. Therefore, you’re not monitoring actual user queries, but structured questions the system generates based on your industry and target keywords.

The Starter plan includes 1,000 pre-built industry prompts organized by topic, plus 350 custom prompts you can define. Each prompt runs across multiple AI platforms, with the system capturing complete responses, highlighting your brand mentions, and showing competitor citations in context.

Scrunch‘s prompt trend tracking shows which topics are gaining or losing momentum over time, though user reviews note that the available trend data is somewhat limited compared to Profound’s volume insights.

Winner for Prompts: Profound decisively wins here. If search volume forecasting is essential to your content planning (and for most marketing teams, it is), Prompt Volumes provides data you simply cannot get elsewhere.

Scrunch‘s synthetic prompt approach works for monitoring but doesn’t answer “how big is the opportunity?” questions.

Content Creation & Optimization

Profound’s Approach: Profound’s Agents feature is a complete content production system designed for AI optimization. The platform offers dozens of templates, including listicles, how-tos, comparison articles, and other formats proven to earn AI citations.

Each template is pre-optimized for AI comprehension, incorporating structural elements that increase the likelihood that answer engines will reference the content.

The Agents workflow lets you refine audience targeting, select specific topics and prompts to optimize for, and build custom content pipelines that integrate with your existing CMS and workflow tools.

Human-in-the-loop checkpoints ensure quality control while still dramatically accelerating production. According to Profound’s positioning, teams can create AI-optimized content in minutes rather than weeks.

The platform also provides optimization insights for existing content, though some users report receiving “no recommendations found” messages, suggesting the optimization guidance isn’t always comprehensive for every article.

Scrunch’s Approach: Scrunch explicitly focuses on content creation. Instead, the platform assumes you have quality content and need technical optimization to make it more accessible to AI systems.

The Insights module provides actionable recommendations, such as “Update FAQ” or “Add structured data,” but these are diagnostic rather than generative.

Scrunch‘s site audit feature lets you check individual URLs to see what AI bots see when they visit, providing a content quality score and checklist of improvements. However, manually auditing individual pages isn’t scalable for brands with large sites.

The platform identifies content gaps and opportunities, but doesn‘t provide tools to generate or edit the text—you’ll need to export recommendations and use separate tools like ChatGPT or dedicated content platforms to create the optimized content.

Winner for Content: Profound dominates if content creation is a priority. Scrunch is better for teams with strong existing content who need technical insights rather than production assistance.

Technical Optimization & Crawler Management

Profound’s Approach: Profound’s Agent Analytics tool provides technical visibility into how AI crawlers interact with your website. The platform integrates with major CDN providers (Cloudflare, Vercel, Netlify, Fastly, Akamai, Amazon CloudFront, GCP Cloud CDN, and WordPress) to track which AI bots access your content, when they visit, and which pages they crawl most frequently.

The integration approach is notably robust—Profound cross-checks IP addresses with published ranges from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and other providers to verify AI identity, ensuring accurate attribution.

The platform provides technical analysis to ensure your site is optimized for AI indexing and retrieval, and GA4 integration helps measure how many human visitors originate from AI-driven search.

However, Profound doesn‘t offer the same level of proactive error detection or remediation guidance as more technically-focused platforms. The tool tells you what’s happening, but provides less specific direction on fixing technical issues.

Scrunch’s Approach: This is where Scrunch truly shines. The platform’s error detection feature automatically identifies when AI bots cannot properly crawl your site and provides specific, actionable recommendations to fix the issues.

Rather than generic advice, Scrunch shows exactly which technical barriers are blocking AI visibility—whether that’s JavaScript rendering problems, robots.txt misconfigurations, or page speed issues.

The real-time AI crawler feed is particularly valuable for technical teams. You can see a live log of bot visits, including which specific URLs were accessed by platforms like Anthropic (Claude), Perplexity, and OpenAI (ChatGPT).

The system categorizes visits into segments like “Citations,” “Training,” and “Indexing,” helping teams understand domain activity patterns and prioritize optimization efforts.

The Agent Experience Platform (AXP) is Scrunch‘s most technically sophisticated feature. AXP sits at your CDN level (typically Cloudflare) and automatically detects AI bot traffic. When an AI crawler visits, AXP serves an optimized, code-light version of your page—often reducing file size by 98% (from 263KB to 4.4KB in Scrunch’s example).

This “shadow site” approach dramatically improves how effectively AI systems can process and reference your content, without requiring you to rewrite your human-facing site.

Winner for Technical: Scrunch decisively wins for technical optimization. The combination of error detection, real-time crawler monitoring, and the groundbreaking AXP makes it the clear choice for technically sophisticated teams.

Profound‘s Agent Analytics is solid but doesn’t match Scrunch’s depth.

Citation Analysis & Competitive Intelligence

Profound’s Approach: Profound’s citation tracking shows which external websites AI engines reference when mentioning your brand or industry topics. The platform displays citation patterns across all monitored AI engines, helping you understand which domains carry the most authority with AI systems.

This intelligence is valuable for link-building strategy and understanding content partnerships that could boost visibility.

The competitive benchmarking module shows your brand‘s visibility score compared to direct rivals, with weekly trend data indicating who’s gaining or losing ground. Users can apply filters to view competitive data across specific AI models or regions.

The platform also provides sentiment analysis showing whether AI mentions are positive, neutral, or negative.

Scrunch’s Approach: Scrunch excels at granular citation analysis. Rather than just showing aggregate citation counts, the platform displays the actual AI responses with your brand mentions highlighted, the surrounding context, and which sources the AI cited.

You see competitor mentions in the same responses, enabling accurate side-by-side comparison.

The competitive insights dashboard shows share-of-voice percentages for each tracked prompt, revealing exactly where competitors outperform you.

Scrunch’s persona-based analysis is particularly sophisticated—you can track how AI presents your brand to different audience segments (CTOs vs. developers vs. IT managers) and identify visibility gaps for specific personas that generic tracking would miss.

The platform’s citation analysis reveals which sites AI loves to cite in your industry, helping inform both content strategy and link-building priorities. According to customer testimonials, companies like BairesDev used these insights to go “from invisible to cited right alongside the biggest players” within weeks.

Winner for Citations: Scrunch provides more actionable citation intelligence with its context-rich responses and persona-based segmentation. Profound offers solid competitive benchmarking but with less granular detail.

E-commerce & Shopping Optimization

Profound’s Approach: Profound is the only central AEO platform with dedicated ChatGPT Shopping optimization features. As AI-powered shopping experiences emerge (ChatGPT now shows shopping tiles for product queries), this capability becomes increasingly valuable for e-commerce brands.

The Shopping feature tracks how your products appear in ChatGPT Shopping results, monitors shopping triggers (keywords that prompt ChatGPT to display shopping tiles), analyzes response patterns in which your products are featured, and provides product-level analytics, including visibility, retailers, and reviews. For e-commerce brands, this specialized functionality could justify the platform cost on its own.

Scrunch’s Approach: According to user reviews, Scrunch has “strong e-commerce features that allow you to track how specific SKUs appear in ChatGPT” responses. However, the platform doesn‘t emphasize shopping optimization the way Profound does, and dedicated shopping features aren’t prominently featured in Scrunch’s marketing materials or documentation.

The standard monitoring and citation analysis capabilities work for e-commerce brands tracking product mentions, but lack the specialized shopping-specific insights Profound provides.

Winner for E-commerce: Profound wins decisively for e-commerce brands focused on AI shopping optimization. If ChatGPT Shopping visibility is a priority, Profound is currently the only enterprise-grade option with purpose-built features.

Integration Capabilities & Data Access

Profound’s Approach: Profound emphasizes integration with your existing content tech stack. The platform’s Agents feature can connect with your CMS, content planning tools, and publishing workflows.

For enterprise deployments, Profound supports custom integrations with dedicated CSM support to coordinate implementation across content, SEO, and IT teams.

The platform includes GA4 integration to attribute AI search traffic and conversions to actual business outcomes. However, CRM integration isn’t prominently featured and typically requires custom API work.

According to our analysis, HubSpot users should plan for 20-40 hours of initial integration work to connect Profound data to HubSpot properties and workflows, with 5-10 hours monthly for ongoing maintenance.

Data export options include standard reporting formats, though some users note that exporting data for external analysis can be challenging—a common complaint in user reviews about workflow limitations.

Scrunch’s Approach: Scrunch’s Data API is a significant differentiator. The platform provides robust API access specifically designed for integration with CRMs, BI tools, and custom dashboards, making it feasible to:

  • Create custom HubSpot properties for AI visibility scores by contact company
  • Build Salesforce dashboards showing prompt performance by opportunity
  • Push data to internal analytics platforms like Looker or Tableau
  • Set up webhook-based triggers for marketing automation workflows

The API approach gives technical teams maximum flexibility to build sophisticated attribution models and connect AEO performance to downstream business metrics. Scrunch also supports standard data exports (CSV, sheets) that integrate with Looker Studio and existing reporting stacks.

For HubSpot users specifically, the Data API makes implementation more straightforward than Profound’s custom approach—typically requiring 10-20 hours for initial setup rather than 20-40 hours.

Winner for Integration: Scrunch wins for organizations with technical resources or marketing ops teams who can leverage the Data API. Profound is better for teams that want white-glove enterprise integration support but are willing to invest more time and resources.

The HubSpot Advantage: With the acquisition of Xfunnel, HubSpot is making AEO a first-class citizen in its platform ecosystem. This integration means marketers can eventually track AI visibility, prompt performance, and citation data alongside traditional channel metrics—all within a unified attribution model.

While both Profound and Scrunch offer integration capabilities, Xfunnel‘s native HubSpot integration (now part of the HubSpot platform) provides the most seamless path to connecting AEO performance to closed revenue.

For HubSpot customers, this acquisition signals that AI search optimization will become as integral to your marketing stack as email or SEO.

User Experience & Learning Curve

Profound’s Approach: Profound’s interface prioritizes comprehensive data analysis over a simplified user experience. The platform is data-heavy with sophisticated dashboards that require investment to master.

User reviews consistently mention a “steep learning curve,” with some describing the interface as “overwhelming” for new users.

However, this complexity comes with power. The platform offers highly customizable dashboards and reports tailored to specific brand needs, enabling advanced users to create personalized views that highlight their most important metrics. For teams willing to invest the learning time, Profound becomes a robust analytics engine.

The platform’s rapid feature releases mean the interface evolves frequently. While this demonstrates product innovation, it also means teams must continually adapt to new capabilities. Enterprise customers receive premium support via email or Slack to help navigate the complexity.

Scrunch’s Approach: Scrunch receives consistent praise for its clean, modern, and intuitive interface. User reviews highlight quick onboarding with guided setup for prompts, competitors, and brand configuration. The navigation is straightforward, with clear dashboards that make tracking brand presence accessible even to team members without deep technical expertise.

The excellent filtering capabilities (by topic, persona, stage, model, and custom tags) are easy to use rather than buried in complex menus. The prompt-level organization makes the platform flexible without being confusing. According to reviews, the platform’s “intuitive UI” means “despite its technical backend, the dashboard is easy to navigate for day-to-day management.”

The main UX limitation noted in reviews is that while Scrunch excels at identifying optimization opportunities, the interface doesn’t guide you toward fixing gaps as comprehensively as some users would like. The insights exist, but feel “underdeveloped compared to the polished monitoring dashboards.”

Winner for UX: Scrunch wins decisively for user experience. If team adoption and daily usability matter (and they should), Scrunch’s intuitive interface significantly reduces the learning curve. Profound is better for power users who value customization over ease of use.

Platform Coverage & Geographic Support

Profound’s Coverage:

  • AI Engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Microsoft Copilot, Meta AI, DeepSeek, Google AI Overviews (9 platforms)
  • Geographic Support: Multi-region tracking for enterprise deployments
  • Language Support: Not prominently specified but implied through global deployment
  • Update Frequency: Real-time monitoring with continuous updates

Scrunch’s Coverage:

  • AI Engines: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, Meta AI (7+ platforms)
  • Geographic Support: Persona-based tracking includes geographic parameters
  • Language Support: Multi-language capabilities for global brands
  • Update Frequency: System updates every three days

Winner for Coverage: Profound has a slight edge in total AI engine count (9 vs. 7+), particularly valuable as newer engines like DeepSeek and Grok gain adoption. Both platforms cover the major engines that drive most AI search volume.

Support, Security & Compliance

Profound’s Enterprise Readiness:

  • SOC 2 Type II compliant with an independent audit
  • Single Sign-On (SSO) via SAML or OIDC
  • Daily automated backups are retained for one week
  • Premium support via email or Slack with a dedicated CSM for enterprise
  • Role-based access controls
  • Enterprise-focused security posture aligned with Fortune 500 requirements

Scrunch’s Enterprise Readiness:

  • SOC 2 Type II compliant with an independent audit
  • Role-based access control (RBAC) for granular permissions
  • Global deployment capabilities across regions
  • Data API security with careful key management requirements
  • Enterprise support with a rapid product development cycle
  • AXP security considerations for AI-specific content delivery

Winner for Enterprise Security: Both platforms meet enterprise security requirements with SOC 2 Type II compliance. Profound edges ahead slightly with explicit SSO support and Fortune 500 positioning, while Scrunch offers more granular RBAC for complex team structures.

Which should you choose for AEO: Profound or Scrunch?

Both Profound and Scrunch have unique qualities that make them excellent tools for enhancing AEO strategies, but which would work best for your strategy depends mainly on your budget and where your business is in its journey.

Early-stage startups with a tight budget should opt for Scrunch as it’s the most budget-friendly option compared to Profound and is much easier to set up thanks to its intuitive user experience. Scrunch also offers robust, citation-focused analysis, making it the best option for teams looking to quickly boost mentions in AI citations.

However, if your business is scaling rapidly and you find yourself in need of enterprise-level analytics and comprehensive brand sentiment tracking, Profound is the platform for you. Profound offers deeper AI agent analytics, more tools, and longer data retention than Scrunch.

Frequently Asked Questions about Profound vs Scrunch for AEO

What is the main difference between Profound and Scrunch for Answer Engine Optimization?

The main difference between Profound and Scrunch lies in their core approach to AEO: Profound is a content-creation powerhouse designed to scale AI-optimized content production, while Scrunch is a technical optimization specialist focused on making existing content more accessible to AI systems.

Profound’s standout feature is its Agents tool with dozens of templates for generating listicles, comparisons, and how-tos, plus Prompt Volumes that reveal actual AI search demand—making it ideal for teams with content production bottlenecks.

Scrunch excels in technical infrastructure, with its Agent Experience Platform (AXP) that creates AI-optimized “shadow sites,” real-time error detection, and a robust Data API for CRM integration—perfect for technically sophisticated teams with strong existing content.

In terms of accessibility, Profound requires enterprise pricing and custom sales consultation, while Scrunch offers transparent pricing with a 7-day free trial. Think of it this way: choose Profound if you need to create more content, choose Scrunch if you need to optimize what you already have.

Which AI engines and platforms do Profound and Scrunch track?

Profound monitors 9 major AI platforms:

  • ChatGPT
  • Perplexity
  • Claude
  • Gemini
  • Grok
  • Microsoft Copilot
  • Meta AI
  • DeepSeek
  • Google AI Overviews

Scrunch tracks at least 7 platforms, including:

  • ChatGPT
  • Claude
  • Perplexity
  • Gemini
  • Google AI Mode
  • Google AI Overviews
  • Meta AI

Both platforms cover the most critical AI engines that drive the majority of AI search volume. Still, I’d say Profound has a slight edge in total platform count, particularly for newer engines like DeepSeek and Grok.

What is Scrunch’s Agent Experience Platform (AXP), and does Profound have something similar?

Scrunch’s Agent Experience Platform (AXP) automatically detects AI bot traffic. It serves them a parallel, AI-optimized version of your pages—reducing file size by up to 98% to dramatically improve how AI systems process and cite your content.

This “shadow site” approach solves technical crawling issues without changing your human-facing website. Profound does not have a comparable feature; instead, it offers Agent Analytics that monitors AI crawler activity and tracks which bots visit your site, but doesn’t serve optimized content specifically to AI agents.

Do Profound and Scrunch help with content creation and optimization?

Profound excels at content creation with its Agents feature, which provides dozens of AI-optimized templates (listicles, how-tos, comparisons) and enables teams to generate content at scale with human-in-the-loop checkpoints and custom pipeline integration with your CMS.

The platform is specifically designed to solve content production bottlenecks and can help teams create AI-optimized content in minutes rather than weeks. Scrunch takes the opposite approach—it assumes you already have quality content and focuses on technical optimization rather than creation.

Scrunch identifies optimization opportunities through error detection and site audits (providing recommendations like “Update FAQ” or “Add structured data”). Still, it doesn‘t offer tools actually to generate or edit content—you’ll need to use separate tools like ChatGPT or content platforms to implement the recommendations.

If content creation is your primary need, Profound is the clear choice; if you have strong existing content that needs technical optimization, Scrunch is the better fit.

Which tool is easier to set up and use for teams without dedicated AEO specialists?

Profound excels at content creation with its Agents feature, which provides dozens of AI-optimized templates (listicles, how-tos, comparisons) and enables teams to generate content at scale with human-in-the-loop checkpoints and custom pipeline integration with your CMS.

The platform is specifically designed to solve content production bottlenecks and can help teams create AI-optimized content in minutes rather than weeks. Scrunch takes the opposite approach—it assumes you already have quality content and focuses on technical optimization rather than creation.

Scrunch identifies optimization opportunities through error detection and site audits (providing recommendations like “Update FAQ” or “Add structured data”). Still, it doesn‘t offer tools actually to generate or edit content—you’ll need to use separate tools like ChatGPT or content platforms to implement the recommendations.

If content creation is your primary need, Profound is the clear choice; if you have strong existing content that needs technical optimization, Scrunch is the better fit.