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Growth experimentation is a structured approach to testing ideas across the full customer journey to discover what drives measurable business growth. Experiments improve channel-by-channel optimization as marketing teams push for measurable, repeatable growth under tight budgets.
Every content marketer seems to be asking the same question: Do semantic keywords still matter in SEO in 2026, especially now that AI engines influence traffic and buying decisions?
Recent data shows that 88 of marketers now use AI every day to guide their biggest decisions, and for good reason. Marketing automation has been shown to generate 80 more leads and drive 77 higher conversion rates. With global ad spend now topping 1 trillion, there’s simply too much data for even the most experienced teams to manage by hand anymore.
As any marketer or SEO knows, there’s a special satisfaction in seeing your hard work pay off in the form of snagging a top result on the SERPs. But in the age of answer engine optimization (AEO), search results don’t tell the full story. To gauge success, you need to learn how to track your brand’s presence in AI search — which introduces a new set of metrics, including mentions, citations, and share of voice.
AI search optimization is the practice of improving brands’ odds of being cited and mentioned by answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and AI Overviews. The traffic it earns is small but high-intent. Across more than 1,200 publisher and news sites, visitors referred by AI tools signed up at roughly 11 times the rate of search visitors, according to a Microsoft Clarity study.
Scrunch vs Semrush comes down to one question: Do you need a dedicated AI visibility tool, or a full SEO suite that now tracks AI answers too? Scrunch is an AEO specialist built to monitor how your brand appears in AI-generated answers, while Semrush is a traditional SEO platform that added an AI Visibility Toolkit to a stack marketers already use for keyword research, rank tracking, and backlinks.
After years of working alongside CRM administrators, I’ve learned the single biggest difference between CRM platforms that drive revenue and ones that collect digital dust. The difference isn’t the software nor the budget, but the quality of the administration behind it.
If a brand is not visible in answer engines, it’s missing critical early-stage influence. According to McKinsey, 50 of consumers now use answer engines, and more than 70 rely on it to ask questions and gather information. That means a growing share of discovery occurs within AI tools and before users click through to websites.
A CRM is like a teenager’s journal – full of sensitive information. But instead of school stories and secrets, it holds contact records, purchase history, support conversations, and for some, health information or payment data, too.
As AI search reshapes how customers discover and evaluate brands, tools like Profound are gaining attention for helping marketers measure visibility within AI-generated answers. But, as budgets tighten, new AI visibility features emerge, and integration demands increase, many teams are actively seeking alternatives to Profound AI.
