Website Monitor Actor

This Apify actor monitors website URLs and provides audits including HTTP status and SEO attributes (title, meta description, canonical tag, robots tag, H1 count), diffed against the previous run. It outputs JSON and Markdown format reports.

Usage

1. Open this Actor on the Apify Store and click Try for free.
2. In the Input tab, enter the list of URLs you want to monitor (and, optionally, a webhook URL — see below).
3. Click Start / Run.
4. When the run finishes, open the Output tab (or the Dataset/Key-value store) to view the JSON and Markdown reports.

Re-run the Actor with the same URLs on a schedule (Apify's built-in Schedules feature) to get a diff against the previous run each time.

Features

• Input accepts a list of URLs.
• Audits HTTP status and SEO attributes.
• Compares new results with stored data in Apify Key-Value Store for change detection.
• Outputs JSON and Markdown reports summarizing the audit and detected changes.
• Optional webhook notification on detected changes.

Input

The input JSON should have the following structure:

{
  "urls": ["https://example.com", "https://another-site.com"],
  "webhookUrl": "https://your-webhook-endpoint.example.com/notify"  // Optional
}

• urls: Array of URLs to audit.
• webhookUrl: (Optional) A URL to receive POST notifications of detected changes.

Output

The actor produces:

• report.json — JSON array of audit results for each URL.
• summary.md — Markdown summary of changes detected since the previous run.

Webhook Notification

If webhookUrl is provided, the actor sends a POST request with a JSON payload summarizing the detected changes.

Payload format example:

{
  "timestamp": "2024-06-12T15:00:00.000Z",
  "changedPagesCount": 2,
  "notifications": [
    {
      "url": "https://example.com/page1",
      "changes": [
        {"field": "title", "oldValue": "Old Title", "newValue": "New Title"},
        {"field": "h1Count", "oldValue": 1, "newValue": 2}
      ]
    },
    {
      "url": "https://example.com/page2",
      "changes": [
        {"field": "metaDescription", "oldValue": "Old desc", "newValue": "New desc"}
      ]
    }
  ],
  "markdownSummaryLink": "summary.md (available in output folder)"
}

Ensure your webhook server accepts POST requests with application/json Content-Type.

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For support or feature requests, please open an issue on the repository or contact the author.

For Developers

To run this Actor locally instead of on the Apify platform:

npm install
npm start

Local runs read input from input.json in the project root and write apify_storage/ (dataset/key-value store) plus output/report.json and output/summary.md, same as a platform run.

Before pushing a change, validate the Actor's manifest locally:

$npx apify-cli validate-schema