Stacker and Scrunch Partner to Measure Earned Media's AI Search Impact

NEW YORK, NY – January 29, 2026 – Content distribution platform Stacker and AI analytics firm Scrunch today announced a strategic partnership to provide brands with a critical new metric: the direct impact of their earned media on AI search visibility. The collaboration will integrate Scrunch’s AI search and citation reporting directly into the Stacker platform, aiming to illuminate a growing blind spot for marketers and public relations professionals.

As generative AI continues to reshape how users discover information online, brands have struggled to quantify how their presence in third-party news articles and publications translates into authority within AI-generated search summaries. This partnership promises a first-of-its-kind solution to connect the dots between earned media placements and a brand’s performance in this new AI-driven ecosystem.

The Shifting Sands of Search and Credibility

The rise of AI-powered search, exemplified by platforms like Google's Search Generative Experience (SGE), is fundamentally altering the digital landscape. Instead of simply presenting a list of blue links, these systems synthesize information from numerous sources to deliver a single, comprehensive answer. This shift places an unprecedented premium on source credibility, a factor that is often built outside of a company’s own website.

AI models are trained to prioritize information from sources demonstrating high levels of Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). Consequently, a mention or feature in a reputable news outlet carries significant weight, signaling to the AI that a brand is a credible entity on a given topic. Until now, measuring this influence has been largely anecdotal. While traditional SEO tools focus on optimizing a brand's owned content and PR platforms track mentions, the crucial link showing how those mentions directly shape AI-generated results has been missing.

This gap leaves brands with an incomplete picture of their digital authority. They might secure a valuable placement in a major publication but have no way to measure if that placement contributed to their brand being cited in an AI summary for a key search query. The new integrated solution from Stacker and Scrunch is designed to close this exact visibility gap.

Bridging the Gap Between Placement and Performance

The partnership leverages the core strengths of both companies. Stacker specializes in transforming brand-funded content into editorially sound stories and distributing them across its vetted network of news publishers, securing valuable earned media placements. Scrunch, an AI Customer Experience Platform, specializes in monitoring and benchmarking brand presence within AI search, uncovering content gaps and citation patterns.

By integrating Scrunch’s reporting capabilities into the Stacker product, customers will gain a new layer of analytics. The platform will now track not just where a story was placed, but how that placement influences AI search responses, brand mentions within AI summaries, and direct citations of the third-party publication.

“AI search rewards credibility, and credibility is increasingly built outside your owned channels,” said Noah Greenberg, CEO of Stacker, in the announcement. “We’ve seen anecdotally how distributing owned content across third party publications can directly impact AI Search visibility, but nothing provided a comprehensive reporting solution for isolating the impact of earned media. By integrating Scrunch into Stacker, we are making offsite URL tracking and AI visibility insights real, usable, and scalable for customers.”

Chris Andrew, CEO of Scrunch, echoed this sentiment, highlighting the disconnect many brands face. “If you are not showing up in AI search, it’s because there’s a gap between knowing which sources impact visibility and the ability to grow your brand presence in said sources at scale,” he stated. “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.”

Redefining the Value of Public Relations

This development is poised to have significant strategic implications for PR and marketing professionals, potentially ushering in a new era of measurement. For decades, PR has relied on metrics like media impressions, ad value equivalency (AVE), and share of voice. While useful, these metrics often fail to capture the direct impact on a brand's digital authority and discoverability.

The ability to measure AI search impact introduces new, more tangible Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Professionals may soon be tracking “AI Citation Rate,” “Share of Voice in AI Summaries,” and a brand's overall “AI Authority Score” as primary measures of success. This will enable them to demonstrate a clearer return on investment for their earned media efforts.

Furthermore, this capability will likely influence content strategy. To maximize their impact, brands and their PR agencies will need to craft stories that are not only compelling for human journalists but also structured for easy comprehension and citation by AI models. This means focusing on clear, fact-based messaging and strategically targeting publications with high domain authority and trustworthiness. The partnership reinforces the idea that in an AI-first world, a strong earned media strategy is no longer just a PR function—it is a core component of a brand's technical SEO and digital authority framework.

A First-Mover in a New MarTech Frontier

The Stacker-Scrunch collaboration positions the two companies as early movers in the race to provide analytics for the AI-driven web. While major MarTech players in SEO and PR analytics are beginning to incorporate AI features, most remain focused on their traditional domains. SEO platforms continue to prioritize owned website optimization, and media monitoring tools are still centered on tracking mentions and sentiment without directly connecting them to AI search performance.

By uniting earned media distribution with AI monitoring in a single, integrated workflow, the partnership offers a solution that competitors currently do not. It addresses a specific, high-value problem for brands that are investing heavily in content and PR to build credibility. As businesses increasingly view AI search not as a future concept but as a present-day reality, the demand for tools that can demystify and optimize for this channel is expected to surge.

The Scrunch-powered AI search tracking and reporting integration is scheduled to begin rolling out to Stacker customers in March 2026. This move signals a significant step forward in providing brands with the actionable insights needed to build and defend their reputation in an increasingly automated information landscape.