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Case Study: How Runpod leveraged the Scrunch AI platform to achieve 4x growth, turning ChatGPT into a top performing acquisition channel 

Wil Armstrong Wil Armstrong •

Runpod provides cost-effective GPU cloud computing services for training, deploying, and scaling AI models. Runpod utilized the Scrunch AI platform to achieve a 4x increase in new customer acquisition through ChatGPT.

ChatGPT is now one of our top-performing growth channels. Scrunch helped us unlock visibility, refine our content, and turn AI search into a core part of our acquisition strategy.” — Emmett Fear, Growth Lead, Runpod

Background

Emmett Fear leads growth initiatives at Runpod, a cloud platform that specializes in training, fine-tuning, and deploying AI models. Runpod’s clients are primarily AI-first, so it was a natural fit for Emmett to leverage AI search as a growth and customer acquisition channel.

Runpod’s ideal customer? A technically fluent, high-intent user base spanning DevOps engineers, indie AI builders, academic researchers, and platform teams evaluating alternatives to hyperscalers like AWS, CoreWeave, and Google Cloud.

The Challenge

In early 2025, Runpod began focusing on AI search, but efforts through that channel soon plateaued at around 300-400 new paying customers per month. Emmett needed a monitoring and insights solution that could:

  • Provide a cost-efficient solution without compromising visibility into performance across multiple LLMs.
  • Support custom prompt creation at the model-level, which would enable him to align with different personas, funnel stages, and niche topics.
  • Export data on demand to guide content strategy, optimize resource allocation, and ultimately bring content creation in-house.
  • Uncover optimization gaps and technical issues, such as why certain content wasn’t being cited or surfaced by AI Search platforms.

​​Runpod needed more than a dashboard, they needed a platform that could make AI search measurable, actionable, and scalable.

Solution

In April 2025, Emmett implemented Scrunch AI to build and scale Runpod’s presence in AI search. The impact was immediate.

  • Cost Efficiency: By switching from a competitor’s platform to Scrunch, Runpod reduced its platform spend by over 80%, cutting costs from $3,000 to $500 per month. Costs decreased, while capabilities and access to data increased.
  • Expansive Prompt Coverage and Granular Insights: Runpod increased its coverage from 50 to 300 prompts overnight, allowing the company to track high-intent, niche queries that align with its technical Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Scrunch provided visibility into prompt-level performance, sentiment, and ranking across ChatGPT, the priority channel for Runpod, which accounts for approximately 98% of its referral traffic.
  • Content Optimization and Visibility Fixes: Using Scrunch’s Site Audit tool, Emmett identified critical rendering issues that prevented Runpod from being properly cited. For instance, several articles were only partially indexed (e.g., titles but not body content). With these insights, the team quickly updated the metadata, restructured the pages, and corrected formatting issues. This unlocked full visibility in LLMs and allowed Runpod to bring content production fully in-house, guided by real-time performance data.

Results

With Scrunch AI, Runpod transformed ChatGPT into a high-converting, cost-efficient growth channel within 90 days. By the Numbers:

  • ~40 new customers per day from ChatGPT (2 week close cycle)
  • 8% conversion rate (2,100 conversions from ~28,000 visitors)
  • 4x growth in new paying customers per month since adopting Scrunch

Conclusion

Runpod’s journey proves that AI search isn’t just a trend, it’s a transformative growth channel. In just 90 days, Runpod turned ChatGPT into a high-performing acquisition engine by treating LLMs as the next frontier of digital visibility. With Scrunch AI, they didn’t just monitor prompts, they activated them, eliminated blind spots in their content strategy, and scaled a growth strategy that keeps compounding.

For growth leaders looking to future-proof their pipeline, Runpod offers a clear playbook: visibility drives velocity.

AI search isn’t coming, it’s here. Interested in learning more? Book a demo with Scrunch AI to learn how you can optimize your brand for the AI customer journey.

About Scrunch AI

Scrunch AI is the leading platform for helping brands gain visibility in AI search results. As discovery shifts from traditional SEO to large language models and AI agents, Scrunch provides marketers with the platform to understand how their brand is being interpreted — and the necessary technology infrastructure to shape it.