Vested, a marketing and communications agency specializing in financial services, has announced a strategic partnership with Scrunch AI, a platform designed to monitor, analyze, and optimize brand appearance on AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Meta AI. This collaboration aims to help financial brands maintain visibility and authority in the evolving AI-driven search landscape, where AI-generated overviews are increasingly replacing traditional link-based search results.
The partnership addresses the growing challenge for financial brands to remain visible as millions of users seek advice and recommendations directly from AI, preferring direct answers over links. Without optimizing content for AI engines, financial firms risk becoming invisible in this new search paradigm.
This initiative builds on Vested’s prior investment in VestTech, a proprietary incubator focused on AI research, development, and evaluation of emerging AI tools. VestTech’s assessment identified Scrunch AI as a suitable partner to support client objectives related to AI visibility, semantic clarity, and content structuring.
Binna Kim, CEO of Group Vested, highlighted the shift in information discovery. “AI is transforming how people find, evaluate, and buy financial services,” Kim stated. “It’s no longer just about Google’s keyword search rankings. Financial firms must now consider how their brands appear in tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity based on millions of questions and prompts being fed daily into AI search models. Through our work with Scrunch AI, we’re helping brands become the source AI platforms cite, trust, and surface first.”
Chris Andrew, co-founder and CEO of Scrunch AI, emphasized the changing role of websites. “Your website doesn’t need to go away, but 90% of its human traffic will,” Andrew noted. “AI agents are the new gatekeepers and Vested understands how high the stakes are for financial brands. Together, we’re making sure they show up, stand out, and earn trust in the era of AI search.”
To address this, Vested’s strategy focuses on Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), which involves creating structured, expert-led content aligned with how AI platforms source and display information. Through the partnership, Vested and Scrunch AI will offer a suite of services, including research and thought leadership (webinars, events, surveys on AEO), AI search audits to evaluate brand appearance across major AI platforms, schema and structured content development to enhance AI citations, digital reputation and authority building via PR and expert-led content, and ongoing monitoring to track brand performance and correct misinformation.
Scrunch AI recently secured $15 million in Series A funding, led by Decibel with participation from Mayfield, Homebrew, and other investors. This funding aims to build infrastructure for AI-native marketing and an AI customer experience platform, underscoring the belief that how brands appear in AI-driven environments will define the next era of marketing. Several of Vested’s clients are already utilizing these AI-optimized strategies, with further activations planned for Q4 and beyond.
