Website Change Monitor

Detect content changes on any public webpage. The Actor fetches each URL with a lightweight HTTP + Cheerio parser (no browser), hashes the visible text (or a CSS-selected region), and compares it to the previous run's snapshot. Results are written to the dataset as new, changed, unchanged, or error rows. Snapshots live in a named Key-Value Store so they persist across scheduled runs.

Ideal for price-page monitoring, competitor landing pages, terms-of-service diffs, status pages, and any text that should not change silently.

Features

• Cheap HTTP checks — Cheerio only; no Playwright/Puppeteer browser cost.
• Persistent snapshots — Named KV store (default website-change-monitor-snapshots) survives across runs and schedules.
• CSS targeting — Optional selector and ignoreSelectors to focus on the region that matters.
• Resilient — Per-URL failures are recorded as error rows; the run still SUCCEEDS.
• Pay per event — Charged only for successful page-checked and change-detected events (plus a tiny Actor start fee). Errors are free.

Input

Field	Type	Required	Description
urls	string[]	yes	Public http(s) URLs to check (max 100; truncated by maxUrls).
selector	string	no	CSS selector for the region to hash. Empty = whole <body>.
ignoreSelectors	string[]	no	CSS selectors to strip before hashing (ads, timestamps, cookie banners).
userAgent	string	no	Custom User-Agent.
maxUrls	integer	no	Cap on URLs processed (default 50, max 100).
timeoutSecs	integer	no	Per-URL timeout in seconds (default 30).
followRedirects	boolean	no	Follow HTTP redirects (default true).
saveHtml	boolean	no	Save previous + current HTML to the snapshot store and include keys in the dataset (default false).
snapshotStoreName	string	no	Named KV store for snapshots (default website-change-monitor-snapshots). Use a different name per project if you want isolated histories.

Example input

{
  "urls": [
    "https://example.com",
    "https://httpbin.org/html"
  ],
  "selector": "body",
  "ignoreSelectors": [".cookie-banner", "time"],
  "maxUrls": 10,
  "timeoutSecs": 30,
  "followRedirects": true,
  "saveHtml": false,
  "snapshotStoreName": "website-change-monitor-snapshots"
}

Output

Each dataset item:

Field	Meaning
url	Input URL
finalUrl	URL after redirects
changeType	new | changed | unchanged | error
changed	true only when changeType is changed
statusCode	HTTP status
checkedAt	ISO timestamp
contentHash	SHA-256 of normalized text
previousHash	Prior hash (null on first sight)
textSnippet	First ~280 chars of extracted text
error	Error message when changeType is error
httpElapsedMs	Request duration
selectorUsed	Selector that was applied
htmlKey / previousHtmlKey	Present only when saveHtml is true

Scheduling tip

Create an Apify Schedule that runs this Actor every hour/day with the same urls and the same snapshotStoreName. The first run baselines every page as new; later runs report changed or unchanged.

Pricing (pay-per-event)

• Actor start — small fixed fee per run
• page-checked — each URL that returned a successful check (new / changed / unchanged)
• change-detected — each URL where changed === true

Failed URLs (error) are not charged as page-checked or change-detected.

Limitations

• Does not execute JavaScript — content rendered only by client-side JS will not appear.
• Bot-protected / login-walled pages may return errors or empty content.
• Very large pages are truncated in the text snippet; the hash still covers the extracted region.

Support

Questions or feature requests: open an issue on the Actor page or email the publisher listed on the Store.