Website Change Intelligence

What does Website Change Intelligence do?

Website Change Intelligence monitors websites and turns meaningful changes into structured, prioritized reports. It shows what changed, where it changed, how important it is, and why it may matter.

Monitor public websites such as apify.com for content updates, SEO changes, new or removed pages, structured-data regressions, technology changes, crawlability issues, navigation updates, and contact-information changes.

The first successful run creates a baseline. Subsequent runs compare the latest website state with that baseline and return only meaningful changes. On Apify, you can schedule runs, access results through the API, export datasets, connect integrations, and monitor run performance.

Why use Website Change Intelligence?

Website pages change constantly, but many changes are unimportant. This Actor helps separate meaningful business and technical signals from routine website noise.

Use it to:

• Monitor competitor pricing, products, services, features, and positioning.
• Detect new landing pages, enterprise offerings, or commercial announcements.
• Find SEO risks such as new noindex directives, title changes, or incorrect canonicals.
• Track structured-data coverage and validation regressions.
• Identify CMS, ecommerce, analytics, hosting, or marketing-technology changes.
• Monitor robots.txt, sitemaps, navigation, internal links, and orphan pages.
• Detect changes to public email addresses, phone numbers, and social profiles.
• Supply structured change data to dashboards, reports, and automation workflows.

How to monitor a website

1. Open the Actor and go to the Input tab.
2. Add one or more websites to startUrls, for example https://apify.com/.
3. Choose the maximum number of pages and crawl depth.
4. Run the Actor to create the initial baseline.
5. Run it again later, or create an Apify schedule for continuous monitoring.
6. Review the website change score, top changes, insights, and detailed evidence in the Output tab.

Each website is monitored independently. Changes from different domains are never combined into the same report.

Input

Main input fields

Field	Description	Default
startUrls	One or more websites to monitor	https://apify.com/
maxPagesPerSite	Maximum pages checked per website	1
maxCrawlDepth	Maximum number of link levels followed	0
includeSubdomains	Include subdomains in the monitoring scope	false
resetBaseline	Replace the saved baseline without reporting old changes	false
changeCategories	Categories included in detailed results	All categories
ignoreSelectors	Page elements to exclude from comparison	Empty
queryParameterHandling	How URL query parameters are handled	Strip tracking parameters
sitemapDiscovery	Use available sitemaps to discover pages	false
browserFallback	Improve extraction for supported dynamic pages	false
maxBrowserFallbackPages	Maximum dynamic pages processed per website	0
timeoutSecs	Request timeout in seconds	45
maxConcurrency	Maximum parallel page requests	10
maxRequestRetries	Retry attempts for failed requests	2
maxChangesPerSite	Maximum detailed changes returned per website	200
baselineStoreName	Storage name used to retain monitoring history	website-change-intelligence-baselines
proxyConfiguration	Optional Apify Proxy or custom proxy settings	Disabled

Input example

{
    "startUrls": [
        {
            "url": "https://apify.com/"
        }
    ],
    "maxPagesPerSite": 100,
    "maxCrawlDepth": 5,
    "includeSubdomains": false,
    "resetBaseline": false,
    "changeCategories": [
        "content",
        "seo",
        "schema",
        "technology",
        "robots",
        "sitemap",
        "links",
        "contact",
        "lifecycle"
    ],
    "ignoreSelectors": [".rotating-banner"],
    "proxyConfiguration": {
        "useApifyProxy": false
    }
}

Use ignoreSelectors for page elements that change frequently but are not relevant to your monitoring goal, such as rotating promotional banners or personalized recommendations.

Output

The Actor returns one main dataset item for each monitored website. You can download the dataset in various formats such as JSON, HTML, CSV, or Excel.

{
    "url": "https://apify.com/",
    "siteId": "apify.com",
    "status": "changed",
    "previousSnapshotAt": "2026-09-01T00:00:00.000Z",
    "currentSnapshotAt": "2026-09-03T00:00:00.000Z",
    "comparisonAvailable": true,
    "baselinePersisted": true,
    "summary": {
        "pagesChecked": 82,
        "pagesChanged": 12,
        "pagesAdded": 2,
        "pagesRemoved": 1,
        "pagesRestored": 0,
        "totalChanges": 31,
        "critical": 0,
        "high": 4,
        "medium": 11,
        "low": 16,
        "info": 0,
        "websiteChangeScore": 67,
        "changeLevel": "significant"
    },
    "topChanges": [
        {
            "type": "content.major_rewrite",
            "url": "https://apify.com/pricing",
            "summary": "The page content was substantially rewritten.",
            "severity": "HIGH",
            "importanceScore": 81
        }
    ],
    "insights": [
        {
            "type": "pricing_change",
            "summary": "A possible pricing or commercial strategy change was detected.",
            "severity": "HIGH",
            "confidence": 0.82
        }
    ]
}

Data table

Field	Description
url	Website that was monitored
siteId	Stable website identifier
status	Baseline created, baseline reset, unchanged, changed, or failed
previousSnapshotAt	Date of the previous successful snapshot
currentSnapshotAt	Date of the current snapshot
comparisonAvailable	Whether a previous baseline was available for comparison
baselinePersisted	Whether the latest successful state was saved
summary	Page counts, change counts, severity totals, and website score
topChanges	Highest-priority changes
insights	Higher-level explanations based on related changes
changes	Detailed changes with evidence and scores
pages	Summary of pages checked during the run
crawl	Coverage and reliability information
warnings	Important limitations affecting the report

Change categories

The Actor can report:

• Content: major rewrites, changed headings, and meaningful sections added or removed.
• SEO: title, meta description, canonical, H1, hreflang, Open Graph, Twitter metadata, and indexability.
• Structured data: schema additions, removals, type changes, property changes, and validation regressions.
• Technology: detected platforms, analytics tools, ecommerce systems, hosting, and possible migrations.
• Crawlability: robots.txt rules, site-wide restrictions, and sitemap changes.
• Site structure: navigation links, internal links, and orphan-page changes.
• Contact: public email, telephone, and social-profile changes.
• Page lifecycle: pages added, removed, redirected, or restored.

Severity and website change score

Every change receives a severity:

• INFO: useful context with little direct risk.
• LOW: a minor change worth recording.
• MEDIUM: a meaningful change that may need review.
• HIGH: an important business, SEO, or technical change.
• CRITICAL: a potentially severe site-wide or high-value-page issue.

The importanceScore ranks individual changes from 0 to 100. It considers the type of change, the importance of the affected page, the size of the change, and the confidence of the evidence.

The websiteChangeScore summarizes the overall level of activity:

Score	Change level
0-10	Negligible
11-30	Minor
31-60	Moderate
61-80	Significant
81-100	Major

The score is normalized so larger websites do not automatically receive higher scores simply because they contain more pages.

How much does it cost to monitor website changes?

Cost depends on the number of websites, pages per website, crawl depth, response time, proxy usage, and the amount of dynamic content.

For predictable costs:

• Begin with 20-100 pages per website.
• Use a crawl depth that matches the pages you actually need.
• Add precise start URLs for important sections.
• Keep enhanced dynamic-page processing limited.
• Use Apify run limits and schedules that match your monitoring frequency.

Small monitoring jobs may fit within Apify's free usage allowance. Check your current Apify plan and platform pricing for exact limits.

Tips and advanced options

• Keep the same baselineStoreName when you want monitoring history to continue.
• Use resetBaseline after intentionally changing scope or comparison settings.
• Add unstable page elements to ignoreSelectors to reduce irrelevant alerts.
• Keep tracking-parameter removal enabled unless query parameters represent separate pages.
• Avoid sharply reducing maxPagesPerSite between runs because lower coverage can reduce comparison confidence.
• Use consistent proxy geography when a website serves regional content.
• Review crawl.inventoryConfidence and warnings before acting on large inventory changes.

Temporary request failures do not automatically mark pages as removed. When a run does not have enough evidence, the report lowers its confidence and preserves the previous verified state.

FAQ, disclaimers, and support

Why does the first run show no changes?

The first successful run establishes the reference baseline. A later run is required before changes can be calculated.

What happens when I reset the baseline?

When resetBaseline is enabled, the latest successful website state replaces the saved reference. The Actor does not report misleading changes against the discarded baseline.

Can it monitor dynamic websites?

Many public dynamic pages are supported. Coverage can still vary when content requires authentication, user interaction, a specific location, or a long-running session.

Why was a removed page not reported?

The Actor only reports removal when there is strong evidence. Timeouts, server errors, access blocks, crawl limits, and incomplete discovery can reduce confidence and suppress removal events.

Are all website changes detectable?

No. Authentication, bot protection, personalization, regional variants, experiments, and inaccessible pages can affect results. Technology and business insights are evidence-based estimates and should be reviewed before making important decisions.

Is website monitoring legal?

Only monitor websites you are permitted to access. Follow the website's terms, robots policies, applicable law, privacy requirements, and reasonable request rates.

For bugs, questions, or feature requests, use the Actor's Issues tab. Custom monitoring rules, reporting formats, integrations, and scoring models can be developed as tailored solutions.