As AI-powered search engines increasingly reshape how information is discovered, marketers are running into a new problem: they can’t see what’s actually influencing AI-generated answers. Today, Stacker believes it has a fix.

The earned media distribution platform announced a strategic partnership with Scrunch that brings AI search visibility and citation reporting directly into the Stacker platform. The integration aims to help brands understand how third-party placements—news articles, syndicated content, and other earned mentions—affect their visibility and authority inside AI search tools.

That’s a growing concern as tools like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, and Perplexity pull from a mix of owned, earned, and third-party sources to generate responses. While marketers have plenty of data on how their own websites perform, what happens off-site has largely remained a black box.

Why earned media matters more in AI search

Traditional SEO rewards well-structured owned content. AI search, however, plays by different rules. Large language models tend to favor signals of credibility—citations, brand mentions, and authoritative third-party sources—often outside a brand’s direct control.

Most AI visibility platforms today focus on owned content discovery: whether a brand’s site is cited, summarized, or referenced in AI-generated responses. That approach misses a key piece of the puzzle: earned media.

Stacker’s core value proposition has always been earned reach—distributing brand stories across trusted publishers to generate third-party credibility. Scrunch, meanwhile, tracks how brands appear in AI search prompts, responses, and citations. Together, the companies are attempting to connect those dots.

The result is a unified view of how distributed stories and earned placements influence AI-driven discovery.

What the Stacker–Scrunch integration actually does

Once integrated, Scrunch’s AI search analytics will be embedded inside the Stacker platform. Customers will be able to track:

• AI prompt responses where their brand appears

• Brand mentions and citations in AI-generated answers

• The role third-party URLs play in AI visibility

• How earned placements compare to owned channels in shaping AI authority

Unlike standalone AI search tools, the Stacker integration adds context—linking AI visibility data directly to specific earned media placements and distribution campaigns.

For marketers trying to justify earned media spend, that connection is critical.

“AI search rewards credibility, and credibility is increasingly built outside your owned channels,” said Noah Greenberg, CEO of Stacker. “We’ve seen anecdotally how distributing owned content across third-party publications can directly impact AI search visibility, but nothing provided a comprehensive reporting solution for isolating the impact of earned media.”

In other words, this turns gut instinct into measurable insight.

Closing a major measurement gap

The partnership highlights a broader industry shift. As AI-generated answers replace traditional blue-link search results, marketers are being forced to rethink what “visibility” even means.

Clicks are declining. Attribution is fuzzier. And influence increasingly comes from being cited, summarized, or referenced—sometimes without a user ever visiting a brand’s site.

Scrunch CEO Chris Andrew framed the problem bluntly.

“If you are not showing up in AI search, it’s because there’s a gap between knowing which sources impact visibility and the ability to grow your brand presence in said sources at scale,” he said.

By pairing Scrunch’s AI monitoring with Stacker’s earned distribution engine, the companies aim to close that loop—showing not just where brands appear, but why they appear there.

How this compares to other AI visibility tools

The AI search analytics space is crowded but fragmented. Tools like Profound, BrandRank, and other emerging platforms track brand mentions in AI outputs, but most stop short of tying that visibility back to specific marketing activities.

Stacker’s approach stands out because it starts with distribution. Rather than treating AI visibility as an abstract metric, it ties performance to concrete earned placements—news articles, data-driven stories, and publisher syndication.

That could give communications and content teams a clearer path from action to outcome, especially as budgets tighten and leadership demands proof of impact.

Implications for PR, content, and SEO teams

This integration also blurs the traditional lines between PR, content marketing, and SEO.

AI search doesn’t care which team produced a piece of content—it cares about authority, context, and credibility. Earned media, long treated as a brand awareness play, is becoming a direct input into search visibility.

For PR teams, that elevates the strategic value of third-party placements. For SEO teams, it signals that optimizing owned pages alone is no longer enough. And for content teams, it reinforces the importance of stories designed to travel beyond a brand’s website.

Rollout timeline and availability

The Scrunch-powered AI Search Insights integration is scheduled to begin rolling out to Stacker customers in March 2026. While pricing and packaging details haven’t been disclosed, the feature will be embedded within the existing Stacker platform rather than offered as a standalone add-on.

That positioning suggests Stacker sees AI visibility not as a bolt-on metric, but as a core part of earned media strategy going forward.

The bigger picture

As AI search becomes the default interface for information discovery, marketers face an uncomfortable truth: influence is increasingly earned elsewhere.

The Stacker–Scrunch partnership reflects a broader recalibration happening across MarTech. Measurement frameworks built for websites and clicks are giving way to systems that track authority, citations, and presence across the wider information ecosystem.

For brands navigating that transition, visibility into earned media’s role in AI search may soon be less of a nice-to-have—and more of a survival skill.

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