By Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek
For most of my career, the website was our most important asset. It’s where we expected the brand relationship to begin in earnest. It’s where campaigns pointed and where journeys unfolded, where we tested messages, optimized conversion paths, measured engagement, and tried to understand what was working.
We built teams, tools, dashboards, and operating models around that reality. And many of us became very good at managing it.
But the world that made that model so reliable has changed.
Increasingly, the first meaningful impression someone has of a brand happens long before they ever arrive at a website. It happens in an AI-generated answer, a summary, a comparison, or an agent-mediated experience that is already forming a point of view about who you are, what you do, and whether you belong in the consideration set.
That does not make the website less important. In many ways, I think it makes the website more important. But it does change the role it plays because it is no longer just a destination. It is now the source material for your brand.
AI systems are reading your website, but they are also pulling from documentation, product pages, old blog posts, customer stories, analyst commentary, reviews, community conversations, partner content, videos, social posts, and all the other places where your brand shows up, with or without you.
And unlike a buyer moving through a journey you designed, an answer engine does not really care which pages you just refreshed, which campaign you prioritized, or which path you hoped someone would follow. It assembles what it can find. Increasingly, what it assembles shapes what buyers believe.
Sitecore acquires Scrunch
As CMO, I can tell you that this is a platform I’ve long wanted to get my hands on. Because while we all recognize that AI discovery matters, the “why” isn’t the problem. The “how” is.
We really don’t need to produce more content or add another dashboard. Frankly, we all need to stop flooding the zone with more AI-generated copy and hoping something sticks. The hard part is knowing what actually needs our attention. At Sitecore, we felt this directly. When we started looking at how AI was describing our products and our company, some of what came back was right. But some of it was outdated, incomplete, or rooted in old product names and positioning. So, we did what most marketing teams would do. We ran content audits. Based on traditional analytics, thousands of pages looked like prime candidates for cleanup – low traffic, low engagement, essentially dead weight. Then we looked at those same pages through a different lens: how AI answer engines were using them.
That’s when the story changed.
Beyond the website: What to change when AI is changing everything
Some of the pages our analytics suggested we delete were the exact pages AI systems were finding, citing, and using to understand our brand. Content that looked expendable in a traditional model was doing heavy lifting in an AI retrieval model. In the traditional view, those pages looked like clutter. In the new reality, they were part of the signal. That was the moment this stopped being an abstract trend and became an operating reality for us.
The analytics stack many of us have relied on for decades was built for a world where the website was the center of the universe, and the click was the ultimate signal of intent. But influence now happens before the click. Trust begins forming before the visit, and consideration is shaped before a buyer ever lands on your site. That is where Scrunch comes in. It showed us exactly where artificial intelligence was getting us right, where it was getting us wrong, which sources were shaping the answers, and where competitors were appearing. It moved our internal conversation from anxiety to action.
Because simply knowing “AI discovery matters” is not a strategy. The real opportunity is not to flood the zone with more AI-generated content and hope something sticks. That is not how brands build trust. The real opportunity is to understand what content matters, what expertise already exists inside the business, and how to make it easier to find, understand, and trust. Most companies have far more to work with than they realize, buried deep inside product documentation, sales enablement, analyst materials, technical research, customer insights, support content, and the knowledge of the people closest to customers. A lot of it sits below the waterline.
In this new era, expertise should not stay hidden. It is source material. And bringing it to the surface is where the marketing operating model has to change. This is not an SEO fix or a content cleanup exercise. It touches governance, workflow, approvals, measurement, reuse, and the way marketing teams work across the business.
That is why Sitecore and Scrunch make sense together. Scrunch gives marketers visibility into how their brands are represented in AI. Sitecore brings the content engine, governance, and orchestration capabilities to act on those insights. That signal shouldn’t sit in a separate dashboard waiting for someone to interpret it. It should become a natural part of how marketing teams plan, brief, create, approve, reuse, personalize, and deliver content across the experiences that matter. That is what I would tell my fellow CMOs: once you see the gap clearly, you have to start working differently. If your board is not already asking how your brand shows up in AI, it will be soon. And “we think we’re fine” won’t be a strong enough answer. Share of voice in AI is becoming a real marketing metric. So is accuracy. So is source influence. These things can be measured and improved. But you have to see them first. The companies that get this right will stop treating content as a volume game. They will know which expertise matters, where it lives, and how to make it easier for buyers and answer engines to find and trust.
Scrunch gives marketers a way to see a channel many of us have been feeling but could not fully measure or manage. And that is why bringing Scrunch into Sitecore matters: because once you can see what needs to change, you need a way to act.
Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek is the Chief Marketing Officer of Sitecore.
