By Jaxon Parrott, CEO of AuthorityTech
When two platforms announce a strategic integration, the press release usually reads like corporate Mad Libs: “synergies,” “best-in-class,” “industry-leading.” You skip to the second paragraph hoping for something concrete, find more buzzwords, then close the tab.
Last week’s Stacker + Scrunch announcement is different. Not because the press release was particularly artful—it wasn’t. But because it closes a visibility gap that’s been hiding in plain sight since ChatGPT went mainstream: we’ve had no systematic way to measure how earned media actually influences AI search results.
Until now.
This isn’t just another tool partnership. It’s the first integrated solution that connects what brands distribute through third-party channels to what AI engines actually cite. If you’re in PR, comms, or content strategy, this changes your measurement framework overnight.
Let me explain why this matters more than you might think.
Here’s the problem Stacker + Scrunch solves:
What we could measure before:
What we couldn’t measure:
This gap created a strategic problem. Brands knew AI search was growing—daily users jumped from 14% to 29.2% in 2025 alone (HigherVisibility data). They knew earned media drove citations—95% of AI citations come from non-paid coverage (Muck Rack analysis).
But they couldn’t connect the two. You’d secure a TechCrunch placement, cross your fingers, and hope it somehow translated to AI visibility. No tracking. No attribution. No feedback loop for optimizing future placements.
It’s like running paid ads without conversion pixels. You know something is working, but you’re blind to what, why, and how much.
To be fair, AI visibility platforms already existed: Otterly, Siftly, Goodie, AthenaHQ, and others. These tools track brand mentions across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini.
They answer critical questions:
But they all share the same limitation: they focus on owned content discovery.
These platforms excel at monitoring whether your website gets cited. Whether your blog posts appear in AI answers. Whether your product pages rank in AI search.
What they don’t track—what they can’t track without integration like Stacker + Scrunch—is how earned distribution through third-party publications influences those results.
When Forbes publishes an article featuring your brand, existing tools see the citation. But they can’t tell you:
This is the blind spot. And it’s massive.
The Stacker + Scrunch partnership closes this loop by pairing two previously siloed capabilities:
Stacker side:
Scrunch side:
Together:
According to Stacker CEO Noah Greenberg, “AI search rewards credibility, and credibility is increasingly built outside your owned channels. By integrating Scrunch into Stacker, we are making offsite URL tracking and AI visibility insights real, usable, and scalable for customers.”
Translation: you can finally answer the question every CMO asks about PR—what’s the ROI?—with data instead of anecdotes.
Three things make this integration strategically significant:
For decades, PR suffered from the measurement problem. Unlike paid ads (direct attribution) or SEO (traffic + rankings), earned media relied on vanity metrics: impressions, AVE (advertising value equivalent), media tier designations.
These metrics never satisfied CFOs. “You secured a Forbes placement—so what? Did it generate pipeline?”
Most PR teams couldn’t answer that question with data. So PR budgets stayed small, treated as “brand building” rather than demand generation.
Now, with earned media directly tied to AI visibility—and AI search driving purchase decisions at scale—PR becomes quantifiable:
Suddenly PR isn’t soft. It’s the highest-leverage channel for AI-era discoverability.
When you can measure that Forbes placements drive 3x more AI citations than tier-2 outlets, you stop treating all media coverage equally.
Traditional PR prioritizes:
AI-informed PR prioritizes:
This fundamentally changes what “good PR” looks like. A single high-citation-velocity placement beats 10 low-impact ones. A trade publication that AI cites frequently outperforms a prestigious outlet AI ignores.
You optimize for AI trust signals, not journalist vanity or media kit logos.
Without attribution, you can’t optimize. With it, you build systems.
Old workflow:
New workflow:
This is the difference between tactics and systems. One produces random outcomes. The other compounds predictably.
Chris Andrew, Scrunch CEO, framed it perfectly: “There’s a gap between knowing which sources impact visibility and the ability to grow your brand presence in said sources at scale. Together, Scrunch and Stacker close that loop by connecting AI search performance to earned brand presence, so teams can see what is driving authority and take action.”
See → measure → optimize → compound. That’s a system.
If you’re still treating PR as “nice to have,” you’re about to get disrupted by competitors who don’t.
The strategic shift:
Before (2024-25):
“We do PR for brand awareness and owned content for SEO.”
Now (2026):
“We do PR because it’s the highest-leverage driver of AI visibility, which determines whether buyers discover us.”
PR isn’t adjacent to growth. In the AI era, PR is the growth channel that determines whether you exist in the consideration set.
If you’re responsible for brand visibility, here’s what changes:
1. Audit your current earned media against AI citations
Which past placements actually drove AI visibility? Use Scrunch, Otterly, or Siftly to baseline where you stand. Then map recent earned coverage to citation lift. You’ll discover which outlets AI trusts in your category.
2. Reallocate budget toward citation-velocity outlets
Stop treating all placements equally. A tier-2 trade publication that AI cites 50 times beats a tier-1 prestige outlet AI cites twice. Find your high-velocity sources and prioritize them ruthlessly.
3. Build systematic earned distribution, not episodic campaigns
AI citation rates peak within 7 days of publication, with 50%+ citations coming from content less than 12 months old. Sporadic PR campaigns don’t compound. Consistent earned distribution does. Systems beat campaigns.
4. Create cite-worthy content anchors
Journalists need angles that add new information: original research, proprietary data, contrarian frameworks, market timing insights. Build your PR strategy around research-backed thought leadership, not generic product pitches.
5. Measure AI share of voice as your North Star
Forget AVE. Track: citation frequency, brand visibility score, competitive AI share of voice, sentiment in AI responses, source diversity. These metrics determine whether you win or lose in AI-assisted buyer journeys.
Step back for a moment. What’s actually happening here?
We’re watching the convergence of three previously separate functions:
In the traditional stack, these lived in different teams with different KPIs. PR reported to brand. SEO reported to marketing. Demand gen owned revenue.
In the AI era, they collapse into one integrated system:
Earned media (PR) → Entity strengthening (SEO) → AI citations (demand gen)
The Stacker + Scrunch integration is the first platform architecture that mirrors this convergence. It’s not PR software. It’s not SEO software. It’s not marketing attribution software.
It’s AI visibility infrastructure—the connective tissue that links external credibility signals to measurable discovery outcomes.
This is what category creation looks like: not a new feature, but a new layer that didn’t exist before.
The integration rolls out in March 2026. Early adopters will have a 6–12 month advantage measuring and optimizing what competitors are still guessing at.
That window matters. AI engines update their models frequently. The brands that identify high-citation-velocity sources first will compound authority faster. By the time competitors catch up, the entity graph gap will be significant.
This isn’t about adopting new software. It’s about recognizing that visibility in 2026 is determined by systems that connect external credibility to AI trust signals.
If you’re still measuring PR success by impressions and media tier, you’re optimizing for a channel that no longer drives discovery.
If you’re still treating earned media as unmeasurable brand building, you’re leaving measurable growth on the table.
The blind spot just got closed. The question is whether you’ll be early or late to act on it.
Jaxon Parrott is CEO and Founder of AuthorityTech. We help B2B brands build measurable AI visibility through performance PR strategies. Check your AI visibility for free to see where you stand in AI search.