Is Sited better than Scrunch AI for AI visibility?

Sited is the better choice if you're a founder or small team that wants a fast, affordable, one-off read on your AI visibility: it costs $50 once, with a free scorecard to start, and gives you a prioritised action list in minutes. Scrunch AI is the better choice if you're a brand or agency that needs ongoing monitoring across AI engines and a content layer that serves machine-readable pages to crawlers, but that comes with a subscription starting at $250 a month. The right pick depends on whether you need a snapshot or a dashboard, and this week's research on Google's AI Mode shows exactly why that snapshot matters more than ever right now.

What changed?

A new wave of attention has hit a study showing that Google's AI-first search experience is actively pushing people away from clicking through to websites, without making their searches any better. MarketingProfs reported this week that a randomised field experiment involving 1,100 tracked Google users found that Google's AI search features reduced referrals to external websites and that forced use of AI Mode lowered users' satisfaction with Search, with participants assigned to AI Mode less likely to click external links, conducting fewer search sessions, and more likely to try Bing, DuckDuckGo or Yahoo.

The underlying research, covered in detail by Search Engine Land, found that researchers forced some participants' Google searches into AI Mode, and the share of searches that led to an external website fell by 18.8 percentage points compared with when people used Google normally. The decline was not evenly spread: the share of users who clicked news sites fell by 12.5 percentage points, the share clicking Reddit fell 21.2 points, while Wikipedia fell 9.9 points.

Crucially, the researchers didn't just measure clicks, they also tested whether the trade-off was worth it for users. It wasn't. Removing AI Overviews increased external clicks without producing a detectable decline in users' perception of Google Search, and researchers also found that AI Mode reduced trust, usefulness, satisfaction and perceived personal relevance, with especially strong effects among heavy Google users.

Background on the study itself, reported by TechWyse: researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Northeastern University confirmed those findings in a preregistered field experiment published to arXiv on 18 August 2026. The methodology was unusually rigorous for this field: unlike prior research on the topic, which relied on observational comparisons of search traffic before and after AI Overviews rolled out, this paper used a custom-built browser extension to randomly assign real users to see or not see the AI-generated summaries Google places atop many search results pages, recording browsing history and snapshots of search results pages to track searches, clicks, AI Overview appearances and whether users navigated to external sites.

Why does this matter for your business?

This is the first causal, not just correlational, evidence that AI Mode specifically, as distinct from standard AI Overviews, is actively training users to abandon the open web and try rival search engines instead. If you run a business that depends on organic search traffic converting into leads or sales, this is no longer a theoretical risk: the findings provide experimental evidence that an AI-first Google search experience can substantially reduce traffic to publishers and other websites, and for publishers that rely on search referrals to reach audiences, broader adoption of AI Mode could further reduce this traffic source.

It also means the old SEO playbook of ranking for keywords is now only half the job. If Google's own AI Mode is suppressing clicks even to well-ranked pages, your visibility increasingly depends on whether AI systems choose to mention and cite your brand directly inside the answer itself, not just whether you appear in a results list underneath it.

Sited vs Scrunch AI: which fits this moment?

This is exactly the kind of shift that has fuelled a wave of AI visibility tools, and Scrunch AI is one of the more established names in that category. It positions itself as a brand AI-visibility platform that monitors how a brand appears across AI engines and serves AI-optimised, machine-readable pages to crawlers through its Agent Experience Platform, covering roughly six engines including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. That's a genuinely useful model if clicks are falling and you need to know, continuously, how your brand is being represented inside AI answers rather than just on search results pages.

Scrunch AI's strengths are real: ongoing monitoring and competitor benchmarking over time, a content layer that serves machine-readable pages directly to crawlers, and enterprise features like SSO, a dedicated Enterprise Data API and a go-to-market team, backed by a Series A and established brand customers. For a marketing team with a dedicated budget and a dashboard habit, that's a credible proposition.

But that model comes at a price built for teams, not founders. Scrunch AI's plans start at $250 a month billed annually ($300 month-to-month) for Starter, rising to $417 a month billed annually ($500 month-to-month) for Growth, with custom Enterprise pricing on top and only a 7-day free trial to test it. That's roughly $3,000 or more a year before you've fixed a single thing on your site. Sited, by contrast, is a single $50 payment, starting with a free scorecard, with no trial clock, no onboarding call and no subscription to manage. It's a point-in-time audit with prioritised fixes, built for a founder who wants a clear answer this week, not a platform to run every month.

For the reader this article is written for, that difference decides it. If you need enterprise-grade continuous monitoring with an API and a go-to-market team behind it, Scrunch AI is built for that job. If you want to find out right now whether AI systems are citing your brand, and what to fix first, without signing up for a subscription or sitting through a sales call, Sited is the better fit, and it's not close on price or speed. You can see where you currently stand with a free AI visibility audit at Sited before deciding whether you need anything more than that.

What should you do now?

Start by checking whether your own site still earns clicks when it does get cited inside an AI answer, not just whether it's mentioned at all. A citation with no click is a vanity metric if it isn't accompanied by a reason for someone to visit your actual page.

Second, treat content written for AI summarisation differently from content written to be read in full on your site. If AI Mode is compressing whole topics into a single answer box, the pages that still earn a click are the ones offering something the summary can't: tools, calculators, pricing detail, or proof that can't be condensed into three sentences.

Third, don't wait for a quarterly report to find out where you stand. Given how quickly these dynamics are shifting, a quick point-in-time check now, followed by fixes, beats a slow-moving dashboard you don't have time to read.

Frequently asked questions

Does this study apply to AI Overviews as well as AI Mode?

Yes, but the effects differ. Researchers found a different pattern when they tried to remove Google's AI Overviews: the no-AI treatment increased external click-through rates by an estimated 8.8 percentage points, though that result comes with a caveat, since Google changed the HTML structure of AI Overviews during the experiment, making the researchers' blocking mechanism less effective, with the intervention successfully hiding about 51% of AI Overviews.

Is this the first study to show AI search hurts publisher traffic?

No, but it's among the most rigorous. Earlier work relied on before-and-after comparisons; this study used a preregistered field experiment with 1,100 participants on Google Search to estimate the causal effects of AI Overviews and AI Mode on user behaviour, publisher traffic and user perceptions, giving it stronger causal weight than observational data.

Should I stop trying to rank in Google Search at all?

No. Clicks still happen, and ranking well remains the foundation for being cited in the first place. But ranking alone is no longer sufficient when a growing share of searches end inside an AI summary rather than on a results page.

What's the quickest way to check my AI visibility without committing to a monitoring subscription?

Run a one-off audit rather than signing up for a recurring tool. Sited's free scorecard and $50 report are built for exactly this: a fast, self-serve snapshot of how AI systems currently represent your brand, with fixes you can act on immediately.

Is Scrunch AI a bad choice?

Not at all, it's a capable platform for teams that need continuous, multi-engine monitoring and an enterprise content layer. It's simply built for a different buyer, and a different budget, than a founder who wants a quick, affordable read today.