Effective December 15
Scrunch is updating how Brand Presence is calculated so that your reporting reflects a more accurate picture of when your brand is actually mentioned inside an AI generated answer. This update affects how Presence is counted going forward, and it also includes a re-evaluation of historical responses so that your trend lines remain consistent over time.
What is changing
Until now, Scrunch counted brands as “present” if the brand name appeared inside the text or title of a cited URL. In some cases, an AI model may cite a page that mentions your brand even though the model’s answer never refers to your brand directly. That edge case can inflate Presence and does not reflect how a consumer experiences the answer.
Starting December 15, Presence will only count when your brand is explicitly mentioned in the AI response itself. Citations will still be visible in the Citations tab, but they will no longer influence Presence unless the model includes your brand in its written answer.
Why we are making this update
Scrunch’s mission is to help brands stay visible, accurately represented, and favored inside AI driven search experiences. Presence is one of the core signals that teams rely on to track visibility across platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Meta AI, and others. For this reason, our calculation needs to match what a real user sees. When an answer never refers to a brand directly, consumers do not perceive that brand as present, even if a cited page includes it.
This change brings Presence in line with what customers expect. It also improves the alignment between Presence, Position, Sentiment, and Competitor Presence across the platform.
What you may notice
To keep your reporting smooth and reliable, Scrunch will re-evaluate historical responses going back in time. This ensures that trends remain comparable before and after the update.
Because of this you may see:
Lower Presence percentages for some topics
Shifts in week-over-week or month-over-month trends
A clearer gap between branded and non-branded visibility
A more consistent relationship between Presence and the model’s written summaries
Your underlying response data, citations, and competitor mentions are still available exactly as before.
What you need to do
No action is required. The update will apply automatically on December 15. If your team uses Scrunch data in Looker Studio, exports, or the API, the new Presence calculation will be reflected automatically in those environments as well.
If you want to understand how a specific prompt or topic is affected, you can review individual responses in the Prompts tab or explore citation patterns in the Citations tab.
Questions
If you have any questions about this update or want help interpreting changes in your Presence metrics, reach out to your Scrunch team. We are here to help you get the clearest possible view of how AI platforms represent your brand. Reach out to support@scrunchai.com.