Website Change Monitor

Monitor any website for content changes. Get notified when prices change, content updates, policies are modified, or job postings appear. Stores snapshots between runs for comparison and generates human-readable diff summaries.

Features

• Three monitoring modes: Full page text, specific CSS selectors, or regex text patterns
• Smart diff comparison: Stores content snapshots and generates readable change summaries
• Noise reduction: Ignore whitespace, case, or number changes to avoid false positives
• Screenshot capture: Optional full-page screenshots when changes are detected
• JavaScript rendering: Full Playwright browser for dynamic/SPA websites
• Persistent storage: Snapshots stored in key-value store between runs

Use Cases

• Price monitoring: Track competitor pricing pages with CSS selectors
• Content tracking: Monitor blogs, news sites, or documentation for updates
• Regulatory compliance: Watch policy pages for changes
• Job monitoring: Check career pages for new postings
• Stock/availability: Monitor product pages for inventory changes
• SEO tracking: Detect changes to competitor meta tags and content

How It Works

1. First run: The actor visits each URL, extracts content, computes a hash, and stores a baseline snapshot
2. Subsequent runs: Compares current content hash against the stored snapshot
3. Change detected: Generates a diff summary showing what was added/removed
4. Results: Outputs structured data with change status, timestamps, and summaries

Input Configuration

Field	Type	Default	Description
urls	array	required	List of URLs to monitor
checkMode	string	full_page	How to check: full_page, selector, or text_pattern
selectors	array	[]	CSS selectors (for selector mode)
textPattern	string	""	Regex pattern (for text_pattern mode)
ignoreWhitespace	boolean	true	Normalize whitespace
ignoreCase	boolean	false	Case-insensitive comparison
ignoreNumbers	boolean	false	Strip numbers before comparison
screenshot	boolean	false	Screenshot on change

Output

Each monitored URL produces a result with:

{
    "url": "https://example.com/pricing",
    "domain": "example.com",
    "changed": true,
    "isFirstCheck": false,
    "currentHash": "abc123...",
    "previousHash": "def456...",
    "contentLength": 5432,
    "changesSummary": "Added 3 lines. Sample: New Enterprise plan at $99/mo",
    "checkedAt": "2026-02-23T10:00:00Z",
    "previousCheckAt": "2026-02-22T10:00:00Z",
    "checkMode": "full_page"
}

Scheduling

Set up a schedule in Apify to run this actor periodically:

• Every hour for price monitoring
• Daily for content/policy tracking
• Weekly for general website monitoring

Combined with Apify's webhooks or integrations, you can send change alerts to Slack, email, or any other service.

Tips

• Use selector mode for precise monitoring (e.g., .price, .product-title)
• Enable ignoreWhitespace to avoid false positives from formatting changes
• Use ignoreNumbers when monitoring content where timestamps or counters change
• Set waitForSelector for JavaScript-heavy sites that need time to render
• Screenshots help verify what changed visually