Smart Website Change Monitor

Stop manually checking websites for changes.

Smart Website Change Monitor tracks public webpages and reports meaningful changes in prices, stock availability, text content, and job listings without alerting you for every timestamp, cookie banner, rotating widget, or minor HTML update.

What can you monitor?

• Price changes — detect increases and decreases
• Stock availability — track in-stock / out-of-stock transitions
• Job listings — detect added or removed job links
• Text changes — watch meaningful content updates
• Specific page sections — monitor only the CSS selector you care about
• Webhooks — send detected changes to your own automation
• Optional AI summaries — turn a detected change into a short explanation

Common use cases

Competitor price monitoring

Track product pages and detect when a competitor changes a price.

Stock alerts

Monitor unavailable products and detect when they return to stock.

Career page monitoring

Watch company career pages for newly added or removed job openings.

Terms, policy, and documentation monitoring

Detect meaningful updates to pricing pages, terms, policies, release notes, or documentation.

Supplier monitoring

Track supplier pages for price, availability, and content changes.

Quick start

1. Add one or more webpage URLs.
2. Keep Monitoring mode on Auto for most pages.
3. Optionally add a CSS selector such as .product_main, #price, or main.
4. Run the Actor once to create a baseline.
5. Run it again manually or on an Apify Schedule.
6. Read the dataset output or send meaningful changes to a webhook.

For most users, the defaults are enough.

Recommended first product-page test

Use:

https://books.toscrape.com/catalogue/a-light-in-the-attic_1000/index.html

Recommended settings:

• Monitoring mode: Auto
• Page rendering: HTTP only
• CSS selector: .product_main

The Actor should extract the product price and stock status, then save them as the baseline.

How it works

The first successful run creates a baseline in a named Apify key-value store. Future runs compare the current page against the previous successful observation.

A state key includes the URL, monitoring mode, and CSS selector, so different monitoring configurations do not overwrite one another.

The Actor uses a low-cost HTTP request first. In auto rendering mode, it falls back to a Chromium browser only when the page appears blocked, returns an error, or looks essentially empty.

Monitoring modes

• auto — price + stock + job links + meaningful text
• text — substantial text changes only
• price — extracted price changes
• stock — availability transitions
• jobs — added or removed detected job links

Reducing false alerts

For noisy or highly dynamic pages, set a CSS selector to the smallest stable page section you care about.

Examples:

• #price
• .product-info
• .product_main
• main

The Actor also removes common non-content elements and supports custom ignore selectors.

Persistent monitoring

Default state store: smart-change-monitor-state

Keep the state-store name unchanged for scheduled monitoring. Use Reset baseline only when you intentionally want the current page to become the new reference state.

Webhook notifications

Set notificationWebhookUrl to POST meaningful detected changes to Make, Zapier, Slack bridges, your own API, or another automation system.

If your endpoint requires authentication, add an encrypted bearer token in webhookBearerToken.

Optional AI summaries

AI is an optional enhancement, not a dependency. The deterministic monitor decides whether a change happened.

If enabled, provide your own encrypted OpenAI API key. The Actor uses a low-cost text model by default to summarize the detected before/after change. AI-summary failure does not break core monitoring.

Output

Each dataset item can include:

• URL and final URL
• status: initialized / changed / unchanged / error
• deterministic summary
• optional AI summary
• significance score
• text-change percentage
• prices before and after
• stock state before and after
• stock evidence before and after
• jobs added and removed
• HTTP or browser fetch method
• timestamps

The dataset includes Overview and Details views for easier inspection.

Pricing

This Actor uses transparent pay-per-event pricing:

• Page checked: $2.00 per 1,000 pages
• Browser render: $5.00 per 1,000 renders
• Change detected: $0.008 per detected change
• AI change summary: $0.01 per summary
• Actor start: $0.00005 per run

Most pages are checked using lightweight HTTP requests first. Browser rendering is used only when needed, helping keep monitoring costs low.

You only pay for the events used during your runs. AI summaries are optional.

See the Pricing tab in Apify Store for the current pricing configuration.

Reliability and responsible use

• Monitor only public pages you are allowed to access.
• Follow applicable website terms, laws, and rate limits.
• auto rendering is designed for compatibility and cost control, not to bypass access restrictions.
• Some CAPTCHA or sophisticated anti-bot systems may prevent collection.
• A narrow CSS selector is strongly recommended for highly dynamic pages.
• Price extraction favors structured data before text matching.
• Stock extraction recognizes common English and Turkish availability language.
• Job mode works best on dedicated careers/listing pages.

Support

If you encounter an issue, use the Issues tab on the Actor's Apify Store page and include the target URL (when shareable), monitoring mode, rendering mode, and the relevant run ID.