Sitecore is acquiring generative engine optimization (GEO) startup Scrunch for around $225 million, according to a Bloomberg report, adding AI answer-engine visibility to an enterprise content platform that has been quietly building toward a machine-readable web strategy.

Neither Sitecore nor Scrunch have confirmed the price. The deal marks one of the larger investments in the emerging GEO market: the practice of optimizing brand content so it surfaces in AI-generated answers rather than traditional search results.

Scrunch’s platform shows brands real-time signals about how they appear across various AI platforms, along with competitive analysis and technical audits. Its Agent Experience Platform, or AXP, is designed to deliver content in formats AI agents can read and use without disrupting the human experience. Notable clients include Lenovo, Skims, Headspace, and Penn State University.

“We’re at a pivotal moment where companies must rethink traditional digital strategies and accept that the internet must be written for machines to understand if we want humans to experience it,” Eric Stine, Sitecore’s CEO, said in a statement.

Scrunch CEO and cofounder Chris Andrew echoed the same urgency in his own statement. “By joining forces, we’re helping companies meet buyers where they are, moving beyond traditional SEO to win inside AI-generated answers,” he said. “That’s where Scrunch’s AXP is a critical advantage, delivering content in a format AI agents can read and use, without disrupting the human experience, allowing brands to become the trusted sources that power those answers.”

The GEO space is becoming increasingly competitive as brands seek visibility in the AI experiences where consumers are spending more time. Scrunch previously raised $26 million, including a $15 million Series A last summer led by Decibel, with participation from Mayfield, Homebrew, and others.

The deal logic is in the numbers. Scrunch told ADWEEK last year that conversion rates in AI search are three to five times higher than in traditional online search, citing its own data. “A visitor coming from AI search is buying faster than a traditional organic visitor,” Andrew said at the time. Independent verification of those figures was not provided.

Third-party research offers some corroboration. In research conducted by Akamai, AXP-enabled webpages saw a 364% lift in brand presence in responses to non-branded AI prompts and a 218% spike in citations appearing in AI responses.

Stine said the combination would allow brands to “show up with greater clarity, authority, and relevance so they can build trust, increase share of voice, and influence decisions early in the buying journey when it matters most.”

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For a while, it seemed like Google Search was in trouble.

Seemingly caught by surprise by the AI revolution that ChatGPT sparked, Google looked old and confused as upstarts like OpenAI and Perplexity pointed to a new future that replaced the “10 blue links” with question-and-answer conversations. Google’s first steps into this future were unsteady, with error-filled answers epitomized by the infamous glue-on-pizza moment. Some suspected, for all its scale and influence, a post-Google world was near.

That looks a lot less likely after this week. At Google I/O, the company confidently showed us its version of our informational future. And while it might be post-search, it’s not at all post-Google. Google is expanding its use of AI Overviews, meaning more searches will include the top-of-page summaries, and it’s adding a query box within them. When a user engages with it, they’re kicked to AI Mode, which abandons the “10 blue links” altogether.

In addition, oogle.com now has a “+” icon, similar to its Gemini chatbot. If user engages with it and uploads a file or photo, that will also take them to AI Mode. It’s now extremely difficult to search on a Google product without AI being part of the result. You can still find your page of links by switching to “Web,” though that option is often buried.

So, far from the future where search is competitive again, it’s increasingly looking like a new future that’s the same as the old future. Even if you look just at AI chatbots, the Gemini app is now at 900 million users, making it about as big as ChatGPT. That doesn’t even count AI Overviews and AI Mode, which have 2.5 billion and 1 billion users, respectively, according to the company.

The bots ARE the traffic

The obvious consequence of all this is more searches will begin and end in the query. For publishers, that continues and likely accelerates the ongoing traffic apocalypse. We may, however, have to update our vocabulary: Google Zero—which was supposed to connote an environment where the clicks from Google search were basically nil—feels imprecise.

That goes double when you consider that, as humans spend more time in AI interfaces, a commensurate amount of bot activity spreads out from those queries. So the future isn’t Google Zero. It’s Google Bot Infinity.

So the future is a world where people happily chat—either via typing or speech—to Google, and those Google bots bring the right information and context to answer them. More accurately, those bots bring what they deem as the right information and context to queries. AI systems prioritize information differently from traditional search, looking for information that both fits a pattern but also includes novel and authoritative elements. This is manifesting into the new-but-rapidly-evolving field of GEO, or generative engine optimization. Google’s renewed push into AI experiences means the battle for presence in answers is no longer a side bet. It’s the game.

That’s the media story here in Google’s renewed rise. Once laughed at for how far behind it was in the AI race, it’s now architecting the future where it’s still in charge. Judging by its balance sheet—with earnings steadily increasing even as competitors rise—it’s found the right balance of building the new while preserving the old. Even as it demotes the “10 blue links” that built the company, it’s offering a bevy of new ad products in conversational search that spin up generative ads on the fly. It clearly has the confidence that it can make money in an AI world.

Brands might be less confident about that, and publishers even more so. Authority in AI answers is nice, but monetizing has so far been a challenge.

Credibility is the new click

But it’s not nothing. If Google’s AI layer becomes the place where people encounter information, then presence inside that layer becomes a form of distribution. A publisher cited consistently in answers about politics, technology, health, finance, or culture has something valuable: proof that it owns authority in a category. The old metric was how many people Google sent to you. The new one may be how often Google needs you to make its answers credible.

That may not produce the same clean, scalable ad business that search referrals once did. But it points to a different one. Advertisers have always wanted to sit next to authority. They sponsored sections, bought podcast reads, backed newsletters, underwrote events, and cut direct deals with creators because association matters. If a publisher becomes one of the sources AI systems repeatedly rely on, that authority can be sold directly—not necessarily through Google, and not necessarily as a banner ad awkwardly stapled to a webpage.

That’s the hopeful version of Google Bot Infinity. Publishers may lose a lot of casual traffic, and pretending otherwise is foolish. But the ones that produce distinctive, trusted, deeply useful work still have leverage. The job now is to make that work legible to machines without making it lifeless for people.

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Publishers expect to lose 43 percent of their search engine traffic over the next three years as AI-powered “answer engines” keep users from clicking through to news sites.

That’s the stark finding from the Reuters Institute’s Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends and Predictions 2026 report, released today, which surveyed 280 digital leaders across 51 countries.

The damage is already underway. Data from analytics firm Chartbeat shows Google search referrals to news sites dropped 33 percent globally between November 2024 and November 2025. U.S. publishers got hit harder, with a 38 percent decline.

Google’s AI Overviews now appear atop roughly 10 percent of U.S. search results, driving up “zero-click searches” where users get answers without visiting any website. The feature has rolled out to 120 markets.

ChatGPT’s 800 million weekly users are increasingly searching for news within the chatbot. But it’s not replacing Google traffic: ChatGPT delivers just 0.02 percent of all publisher referrals compared to Google Search’s 7.3%.

The report coins a new acronym newsrooms need to learn: AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization. It describes techniques for getting content surfaced within AI chatbots and overview boxes. Traditional SEO agencies are scrambling to add these services, while new specialist consultancies like Discovered Labs and analytics tools like Otterly.AI are launching to help publishers track visibility within AI systems.

A shift (back) to original reporting

Publishers are already shifting priorities. The report found they plan to deprioritize “old-style Google SEO” this year. Instead, they’re focusing on YouTube, AI platforms, and TikTok.

The content strategy is changing too. Publishers plan to cut back on service journalism and evergreen content that AI can easily summarize. They’re doubling down on original investigations, on-the-ground reporting, and human stories that chatbots can’t replicate.

“Journalism’s best response is to double down on the things that make us valuable and unique,” Taneth Evans, head of digital at The Wall Street Journal, told the Reuters Institute. “This year has seen most waking up to the importance of quality, originality and direct, meaningful relationships with our audiences.”

That sounds like a win for readers hungry for substantive reporting. But there’s a catch: investigations and on-the-ground work cost more and require experienced journalists. Service journalism and evergreen content were cheaper to produce and kept larger staffs employed.

The report describes an emerging “barbell effect” in the industry. On one end: human-driven distinctive journalism. On the other: AI-automated content at scale. Publishers stuck in the middle risk getting squeezed out entirely.

For now, most publishers say AI hasn’t cut jobs. Two-thirds reported no staff reductions from AI initiatives. But as the traffic squeeze tightens and the pivot to expensive distinctive journalism accelerates, that math may change.

For newsrooms, the playbook that worked for two decades of Google dominance is being torn up. The question now: Can they write a new one fast enough?

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