Website Content Fingerprint & Change Detector

Create a compact technical fingerprint of public web pages and compare it with a previous SHA-256 hash to detect content changes. Each result combines HTTP status, redirect chain, response timing, page metadata, content hash, security headers, and lightweight page-structure signals.

Why use this Actor

Website monitoring often needs more than “the page changed.” This Actor gives you both a deterministic content fingerprint and enough surrounding context to decide what happened, without requiring a heavyweight browser for every check.

Key features

• Generates a SHA-256 fingerprint from the fetched response body.
• Compares against a supplied previous hash and returns changed when available.
• Captures HTTP status, final URL, redirect chain, response time, content type, and response size.
• Extracts title, meta description, canonical, robots meta, Open Graph, and Twitter/X metadata from HTML.
• Counts H1/H2 headings and approximate page words.
• Captures common HTTP security headers.
• Blocks credentials in URLs, unsafe ports, private IP ranges, and unsafe redirects.
• Produces one deterministic dataset record per input URL.

Input

{
  "urls": ["https://example.com"],
  "previous_hashes": {
    "https://example.com": "previous-sha256-value"
  }
}

Output

Each result includes the requested/final URL, status code, response time, redirect chain, content type and size, SHA-256 hash, previous hash, change status, selected security headers, and extracted page metadata.

Example

{
  "requested_url": "https://example.com",
  "status_code": 200,
  "sha256": "...",
  "previous_sha256": "...",
  "changed": true,
  "page": {"title": "Example Domain", "h1_count": 1}
}

Use cases

• Website content-change monitoring
• Compliance and policy-page watches
• Competitor page monitoring
• Technical regression checks
• Editorial change detection
• Building low-cost prechecks before expensive browser crawls

Pricing

Pay per result. The current price is $0.002 per checked URL, or $2 per 1,000 results.

Limitations

• A SHA-256 change identifies byte-level content change, not semantic importance.
• Dynamic timestamps, ads, personalization, or rotating markup can change the hash even when the main meaning is unchanged.
• JavaScript-rendered content is not executed by this lightweight fetcher.
• Response bodies are capped for predictable resource usage.
• Authentication, CAPTCHAs, and anti-bot systems are not bypassed.

Responsible use

Use the Actor on public pages you are allowed to monitor. It does not access private networks or bypass access controls.