What Signals Is and Why It Matters
Signals is Scrunch's centralized hub for actionable opportunities and alerts discovered in your AI response data. Rather than forcing you to sift through raw metrics on dashboards, Signals surfaces specific items that need your attention - pages that could be optimized, competitive gaps, content opportunities, and more.
Each signal points to a concrete action you can take to improve your brand's performance in AI responses.
Signals is currently in beta. It's a real, working feature that's actively surfacing opportunities for brands, but the capabilities and signal types will continue to expand as the feature evolves.
Where to Find Signals
The Signals tab is located in the left navigation menu, under the "Understand" group. If you're using the command palette (keyboard shortcut or search bar), note that it still recognizes the old term "Insights" as a search keyword, since the feature was recently renamed from Insights to Signals across the product.
The Two Tabs in Signals
Signals has two tabs: Observability and Brand Content.
Observability is an ongoing, AI-narrated feed of significant shifts in tracked metrics (Mentions Rate, Citation Rate, ranking position, and more), refreshed nightly, for your brand or your competitors. Each insight explains what happened, why it matters, and what to do about it, with a direct link into the Explorer chart behind the data. This feed is designed to keep you informed of meaningful changes as they occur.
Brand Content is a set of discrete, individually actionable opportunity tiles you review and work through one at a time. When the platform detects a specific opportunity or issue, a tile appears that you can click into to see the details and take action.
How Signals Work
The Observability tab operates as a continuous feed. Each insight in the feed describes a detected trend or shift, explains why it happened, and suggests what to do next. You can mark insights as Useful, Not useful, Dismiss them, or note that you acted on them. Each insight includes a link to the relevant Explorer chart where you can investigate the underlying data.
The Brand Content tab operates on a tile-based system. When the platform detects an opportunity or issue based on your ongoing citation rate and mention rate trends, a tile appears highlighting what was found. Each tile represents a distinct category of actionable insight.
The typical workflow for acting on a Brand Content signal:
A tile appears when something needs attention (for example, pages with optimization opportunities or competitive presence gaps)
Click into the tile to see the specific occurrences - individual pages, prompts, or entities where the issue was detected
Each occurrence includes a recommended action or next step tailored to that signal type
Take action directly from the signal view or navigate to the relevant tool (Optimizer, Knowledge Studio, etc.) to implement the fix
What's Included in Signals Today
Observability
The Observability tab is an intelligence-engine feed that runs nightly and surfaces significant trends in your tracked metrics. It monitors Mentions Rate, Citation Rate, ranking position, and other key indicators for your brand or your competitors. Each insight provides a narrative explaining what happened, why the change occurred, and what you should do about it.
How it works
An intelligence engine runs nightly, scanning metrics like Mentions Rate, Citation Rate, search ranking position, and more, watching for statistically meaningful movement. When it detects a significant shift, it generates an insight card. Insights are viewable over a date range you control (defaults to the last 7 days).
Because Observability depends on data from the intelligence engine, it may show little or nothing until that engine has run for a while on your account.
What an insight card shows
A headline summarizing the shift
The specific metric that moved (e.g. "Mentions Rate") and by how much (a signed delta like "-8pp" or "+12pp")
The scope of the change (e.g. a specific Topic like "Running shoes", or account-wide)
Which AI platform it was observed on (e.g. ChatGPT), or across multiple platforms
Whether the shift is about your brand or a competitor
Whether the shift is good, bad, or neutral for you (a competitor's metric going up is bad news for you; your own going up is good news)
Three narrative fields: What Happened, Why It Happened, and What To Do
A link straight into the Explorer chart that visualizes the underlying data, so you can dig in further
For each insight, you can mark it as Useful, Not useful, Dismiss it, or indicate that you acted on it.
Brand Content
The Brand Content tab includes several distinct opportunity types:
Tile | How It Works | What To Do |
Page Metadata Optimization Opportunities | ChatGPT saw the page in search results but skipped it as a source because the title tag and meta description didn't look relevant enough for the query. | Rewrite the page's title tag and meta description to match the query's intent more directly. |
Content Relevance Opportunities | ChatGPT is already retrieving the page for this topic but doesn't consider its content relevant enough to cite. | Add more directly relevant content to that specific page. |
Competitive Presence Opportunities | A competitor was mentioned in a response to a specific prompt where your brand was not. (Different from the aggregate Competitive Presence % metric shown on dashboards.) | Create or optimize content to improve your brand's visibility on that prompt. |
Brand Protection Opportunities | An AI response cited user-generated content, like a review or forum post, that reflects negatively on your brand. | Surface positive reviews, or publish content that directly addresses the negative sentiment. |
Search Ranking Optimization Opportunities | You have content relevant to a topic ChatGPT is searching for, but it isn't ranking high enough in search results to be picked up as a source. | Apply SEO techniques to improve that content's search ranking. |
Surfaces questions your monitored prompts are asking that your site doesn't adequately answer yet, grouped by Topic. | Pick a format (new post, FAQ, or page update), generate a ready-to-use content brief, then publish it. | |
Automatically surfaces potential sub-brands, competitors, and competitor sub-brands noticed in your AI response data. | Review each suggestion and accept it to start tracking, or dismiss it individually or in bulk. | |
Analyzes the prompts running in a topic to find which are redundant versus which add unique coverage. | Archive prompts that don't add meaningful new coverage, based on the tool's Coverage % and Resilience % scores. |
Common Use Cases
Weekly Optimization Review
Start each week by scanning Signals for new tiles. Prioritize based on volume (how many occurrences) and business impact (which prompts or pages matter most to your goals).
Competitive Monitoring
Use Competitive Presence Opportunities to identify where competitors are being cited in your place, then audit those prompts to understand what content or positioning is winning.
Content Planning
Content Gaps and Suggested Entities feed your editorial calendar by showing you what questions users are asking and what topics your brand isn't yet addressing.
Quality Assurance
Brand Protection Opportunities alert you to inaccuracies or negative framing so you can correct them quickly, either via Knowledge Studio or by improving source content.
Competitive intelligence
Surface when a competitor gains ground in your category. Observability flags competitor metric increases so you can investigate and respond before the gap widens.
Early warning system
Catch negative shifts in your own metrics before they become trends. If your mentions rate drops 8 percentage points on ChatGPT, you'll see the alert, the cause, and a recommended next step.
Attribution of marketing efforts
Connect metric improvements to recent changes. When you see a spike in citation rate after publishing new content or launching AXP, Observability helps confirm the impact.
Topic-level performance tracking
Monitor how individual topics perform over time. If "running shoes" sees a rankings boost on Perplexity, you'll know immediately and can double down on that topic.