Launch Signals: What Companies Shipped (Sitemap Changes)

Give it a list of company domains. For each one it reads the company's own sitemap and tells you what they changed recently: how many pages were updated in the last 7, 30 and 90 days, split by section (changelog, pricing, integrations, product, customers, blog, docs, careers). You also get the most recent notable URLs, a 0–100 launch score, and plain-English pitch reasons you can use in outreach.

It's built for sales and partnership teams who want a reason to reach out this week, such as "their pricing page changed 2 days ago" or "19 new integration pages this month". It's also useful for competitor watching.

No monitors to set up. Page-change monitors only see what changes after you add a page to them. This Actor reads the last-modified dates already in each company's sitemap, so from the first run you see which pages changed in the last 90 days, across every section. Paste a whole account list into one run.

Why it's different: many sites stamp their sitemap URLs with a build date or rewrite hundreds of them in one batch job, so a naive sitemap reader reports thousands of "changes" that never happened. This Actor detects build-date stamps, same-timestamp batches, restamped sections and stale sitemaps, and returns no change counts for them. It won't report fake activity, and you aren't charged for those domains. You pay only for rows with at least 5 trustworthy changes in the last 90 days, something changed in the last 30, at least one pitch reason, and at least 80% of the site's sitemap files read.

What you get per domain

Field	Example / meaning
status	ok (analyzed, charged) or a free status. See Statuses
launchScore	83: 0–100, see the rubric
changes	{ "last7d": 24, "last30d": 99, "last90d": 216 }: pages whose <lastmod> falls in each window. Build-date stamps, batch restamps and restamped sections are excluded
bySection	Per section: urls in the sitemap, dated (pages with a trustworthy lastmod), last7d, last30d, last90d
notableUrls	Up to 20 of the most recently changed (not necessarily new) URLs in high-signal sections (changelog, pricing, integrations, product, customers) from the last 90 days, newest first, with section and lastmod
latestChangeAt	The newest trustworthy lastmod on the site
pitchReasons	e.g. "Pricing page updated yesterday (/pricing): possible pricing or packaging change…", "19 integration pages updated in the last 30 days (e.g. /integrations/sanity-content-agent): expanding their ecosystem; partnership or integration pitch"
lastmodReliable	true (counts reported), false (build-date or batch stamping detected, no counts), null (not measurable: no sitemap, no lastmod, stale sitemap, fetch failed)
noise	What the filter found: verdict (ok, partly_filtered, build_date_stamp, mostly_restamped, rolling_restamp, stale, too_few_changes, no_lastmod), dominantLastmodDay and dominantDayShare, stampedSitemaps, batchRestamps (same-timestamp batches in the last 90 days: at, spanSeconds, urls), bulkUpdates (hours with mass restamps in the last 90 days), sweepRestamps (one-by-one sweeps in the last 90 days: section, at, spanSeconds, urls), restampedSections, rollingSections, excludedUrls (all excluded URLs, including old batches that don't affect any window), recentExcludedShare (the share of the last 90 days' dated pages that was excluded), latestTrustworthyChangeAt
sitemap	origin, primaryHost (host of the first sitemap file read), discoveredVia (robots.txt or fallback-paths), sitemapsFetched, sitemapsFailed, sitemapsSkipped, urlsTotal, pagesTotal (after merging language copies), urlsWithLastmod, offDomainUrlsIgnored, coverage (full or partial), coverageShare (share of the site's sitemap URL-set files fully read, 0–1; sitemap-index files are left out, a file cut at the byte cap counts as not read, and a skipped language file is left out only when a file of the same name without the language prefix was fully read), coverageNotes, files (the first 50 sitemap files and what happened to each one)
redirectedTo	The host the domain redirected to (www. stripped) when it differs from your input, or the domain its robots.txt points all its sitemaps at, else null
delegatedTo	The domain whose sitemaps were read when robots.txt lists sitemaps only on another domain (notion.so lists notion.com's), else null. reason and the first pitch reason name it
reason	Why a row is free, or what was excluded from an ok row's counts. Always set when coverage is partial

Every row also has input (exactly what you submitted), domain (what it was normalized to), analyzed and checkedAt.

Example (real run, 2026-09-26, trimmed)

{
  "input": "linear.app",
  "domain": "linear.app",
  "status": "ok",
  "analyzed": true,
  "lastmodReliable": true,
  "launchScore": 82,
  "changes": { "last7d": 21, "last30d": 74, "last90d": 165 },
  "bySection": {
    "changelog":    { "urls": 255, "dated": 162, "last7d": 1,  "last30d": 3,  "last90d": 9 },
    "integrations": { "urls": 325, "dated": 267, "last7d": 2,  "last30d": 19, "last90d": 53 },
    "customers":    { "urls": 43,  "dated": 28,  "last7d": 0,  "last30d": 2,  "last90d": 6 },
    "docs":         { "urls": 203, "dated": 160, "last7d": 17, "last30d": 44, "last90d": 77 },
    "careers":      { "urls": 31,  "dated": 30,  "last7d": 0,  "last30d": 4,  "last90d": 13 }
  },
  "latestChangeAt": "2026-09-25T20:22:07.000Z",
  "notableUrls": [
    { "url": "https://linear.app/changelog/2026-09-24-new-controls-for-linear-coding-agent", "section": "changelog", "lastmod": "2026-09-25T07:59:41.000Z" },
    { "url": "https://linear.app/integrations/sanity-content-agent", "section": "integrations", "lastmod": "2026-09-23T14:49:11.000Z" }
  ],
  "pitchReasons": [
    "3 changelog/release pages updated in the last 30 days (latest: /changelog/2026-09-24-new-controls-for-linear-coding-agent): shipping actively; reference a recent release in outreach",
    "19 integration pages updated in the last 30 days (e.g. /integrations/sanity-content-agent): expanding their ecosystem; partnership or integration pitch",
    "2 customer stories updated in the last 30 days (e.g. /customers/commure): investing in social proof and sales enablement",
    "44 docs pages updated in the last 30 days: active developer surface; devtools and docs-tooling pitch",
    "4 careers pages updated in the last 30 days: likely hiring"
  ],
  "reason": "Counts exclude 61 of 226 URLs dated in the last 90 days as machine restamps (1 same-timestamp batch in the last 90 days, largest 10 URLs at 2026-07-23T15:28:23.000Z (over 265s); 2 one-by-one sweeps in the last 90 days, largest 23 blog pages from 2026-07-23T15:02:07.000Z over 80 min).",
  "noise": { "verdict": "partly_filtered", "batchRestamps": [{ "at": "2026-07-23T15:28:23.000Z", "spanSeconds": 265, "urls": 10 }], "sweepRestamps": [{ "section": "blog", "at": "2026-07-23T15:02:07.000Z", "spanSeconds": 4822, "urls": 23 }, { "section": "docs", "at": "2026-09-01T08:26:08.000Z", "spanSeconds": 5906, "urls": 15 }], "recentExcludedShare": 0.27 },
  "sitemap": { "origin": "https://linear.app", "sitemapsFetched": 1, "urlsTotal": 1019, "urlsWithLastmod": 966, "coverage": "full" },
  "redirectedTo": null
}

A build-date-stamped site from the same run returns a free row:

{
  "domain": "figma.com",
  "status": "lastmod_unreliable",
  "analyzed": false,
  "lastmodReliable": false,
  "launchScore": null,
  "changes": null,
  "reason": "92% of dated URLs (42304 of 45868) share one lastmod day, 2026-09-25 (within 2 days of this check, or the sitemap file's own Last-Modified day): the site stamps its build date on its URLs, so change counts would be fake activity and none are reported. Not charged."
}

So does a site whose recent dates are batch jobs. vercel.com's sitemap has 126 same-timestamp batches in the last 90 days, the largest 809 URLs on one millisecond:

{
  "domain": "vercel.com",
  "status": "lastmod_unreliable",
  "analyzed": false,
  "lastmodReliable": false,
  "changes": null,
  "reason": "5715 of 6051 URLs dated in the last 90 days (94%) don't count as trustworthy changes: 5493 are machine restamps (126 same-timestamp batches in the last 90 days, largest 809 URLs at 2026-08-18T06:10:12.000Z; section customers (86% of 118 pages on 2026-07-23); section careers (100% of 110 pages restamped within 7 days)), 222 are listing pages or echoes of another change, leaving 336 trustworthy changes. When over 90% of a site's recent dates don't hold up, the rest can't be trusted either, so no counts are reported. Not charged."
}

Same run, other domains:

Domain	Status	Why
notion.so	ok, score 75	248 pages changed in 30 days, read from notion.com (delegatedTo: "notion.com", named in the first pitch reason); 40 files read, and nearly all of the 138 not read are language copies of files that were read, so coverageShare is 0.98
intercom.com	ok, score 45	233 pages changed in 30 days, 230 of them help-center articles; its 6-language help center (/help/de/articles/…, /help/pt-BR/articles/…) counts each article once (7,909 URLs are 3,220 pages)
retool.com	ok, score 48	45 pages changed in 30 days (blog and careers) after 89% of recent dates were excluded, including 42 of 43 customer stories restamped on one second
plausible.io	ok, score 15	5 blog posts in 30 days, 13 changes in 90 days after a 39-URL batch was excluded
techcrunch.com	partial_coverage, free	its sitemap index lists 2,061 files; 40 were read (2%), too few to describe the site
vercel.com	lastmod_unreliable, free	94% of recent dates are batch restamps (above)
figma.com	lastmod_unreliable, free	build-date stamp (above)
nest.com	stale_sitemap, free	newest lastmod is 2024-08-28
zeit.co	redirected, free	redirects to vercel.com (redirectedTo: "vercel.com")
stripe.com, posthog.com	no_lastmod, free	their sitemaps have no dates

How the noise filter works

A sitemap's <lastmod> is whatever the site's build claims. The filter throws out dates that don't describe a real change:

1. Build-date stamp (whole domain unreliable). If 60% or more of the dated pages share one lastmod day, and that day falls in the last 90 days, the domain is lastmod_unreliable. The bar drops to 50% when that day is within 2 days of the check, or matches the sitemap file's own Last-Modified header. An old dominant day (a migration two years ago) is just history, so recent changes still count.
2. Stamped sitemap files. A single sitemap file with 10 or more dated URLs, 70% of them on one day in the last 90 days, is excluded. The site's other files still count.
3. Same-timestamp batches. 5 or more URLs with the very same lastmod second were written by one job, not edited one by one. So is a run of 10 or more URLs each stamped within 60 seconds of the previous one. Both are excluded and listed in noise.batchRestamps. On a sitemap with date-only lastmods, 5 or more pages on one date count as a batch.
4. Bulk-update hours. Any clock hour in which at least max(20, 3% of dated pages) URLs were stamped, capped at 100, is treated as a mass restamp and listed in noise.bulkUpdates.
   • One-by-one sweeps. Within one section, any 60-minute window holding 8 or more stamped URLs is a sweep: a script or an editor restamping pages one after another, 20 to 120 seconds apart, which stays under both the 60-second chain and the bulk-hour bar (vanta.com: 36 /products/ pages between 23:21 and 23:53). Swept URLs are excluded and listed in noise.sweepRestamps. A real launch that touches 8+ pages of one section within an hour is excluded too; the filter prefers missing a launch to charging for a restamp.
5. Restamped sections. A section with 5 or more dated pages, 80% of them on one day in the last 90 days, was restamped as a block (a template change or CMS migration) and is excluded (noise.restampedSections). A section with 20 or more dated pages, 80% of them "changed" in the last 7 days, regenerates continuously (careers pages from an ATS feed) and is excluded too (noise.rollingSections). The same 7-day test applied to the whole site marks the domain lastmod_unreliable.
6. Listing pages and echoes. A post's category, tag and author pages, the home page, /search, pagination and a bare section index (/blog) are regenerated whenever a post is published, so they share its lastmod second. 2 to 4 URLs on one second count as one change, and listing pages never count on their own. Two-segment directory indexes such as /marketplace/apps/, /business/customer-stories/, /products/release-notes/ or /marketplace/partners/ are listing pages too, and a pitch line's example is never a page that has child pages in the sitemap when a leaf page of that section changed; a bare /pricing is not a listing page, and a pricing change that shares a second with a post is the one counted (noise reports echoesCollapsed and listingPagesIgnored). With date-only lastmods, pages on one date are merged only when a listing page is among them.
7. Too little left. If more than 90% of the last 90 days' dated pages were excluded, or fewer than 5 trustworthy changes remain, the domain is lastmod_unreliable. With nothing excluded, fewer than 5 changes in 90 days is too_few_changes, and none at all is stale_sitemap. All of these are free.

When more than half of an ok domain's recent dates were excluded, reason says so, so you can read the remaining counts with that in mind. The filter errs toward under-counting: a real launch that touched 200 pages in one deploy is excluded as a batch.

The same page in several languages counts once, wherever the language sits in the path: /customers/acme, /fr/customers/acme and /en-gb/customers/acme are one page, and so are intercom's /help/de/articles/167-intercom-fur-besucher… and /help/en/articles/167-install-intercom… (translated slugs are matched on their numeric id, and on the sitemap's hreflang alternates when it lists them). A language code after the first path segment is treated as one only when the site uses 2 or more codes in that spot, so /solutions/it/service-desk stays its own page. Tracking parameters (utm_*, gclid, fbclid) and path case are ignored too.

Statuses and pricing

$0.03 per analyzed domain ($30 per 1,000), charged only when status is ok. That takes all of:

• the domain's own sitemap downloaded cleanly (under 25% of files failed, none with a high-signal name) and at least 80% of its sitemap URL-set files were fully read (coverageShare ≥ 0.8; sitemap-index files and confirmed language copies don't count, and a file cut at the byte cap is not fully read);
• its lastmod dates passed the noise filter, leaving at least 5 trustworthy changes in the last 90 days;
• at least 1 change in the last 30 days, and at least one pitch reason or high-signal change (changelog, pricing, integrations, product, customers) in that time. A pricing edit older than 30 days is reported as context but never makes a row billable, and an edit to a release page whose URL date is more than 30 days old (such as /changelog/2023-01-05-dark-mode) is not a new release, so it doesn't count either.

An ok row with coverage: "partial" (some files not read, or one minor file failed) is still charged when those bounds hold; its reason says the counts are lower bounds. Every other row is free, and these statuses never mean "no activity":

status	Meaning
invalid_input	Couldn't parse a domain from the input
duplicate	Same site as an earlier input (duplicateOf is set). https://www.Linear.app/pricing?x=1, www.www.linear.app and linear.app are one domain, and two inputs whose sitemaps are read from the same host (notion.so and notion.com) are one site: only the first is charged
redirected	The domain redirects to a different domain (zeit.co to vercel.com), or its robots.txt lists sitemaps only on an unrelated domain (one sharing no name with yours, such as an acquirer or a sister property); redirectedTo says where. Add that domain as its own input if it's the company you want. The same name on another TLD (notion.so and notion.com) is read, with delegatedTo set. A subdomain input (acme.wordpress.com, blog.acme.com) covers only its own host: if its robots.txt redirects, or its sitemaps point, to any other host (the platform's own site on wordpress.com, substack.com, medium.com and similar), the row is redirected and free
not_public	IP address, localhost, a private-network name, or a domain that resolves only to private IPs
nxdomain	Domain doesn't exist in DNS
unreachable	DNS or the site (robots.txt on https://domain, https://www.domain and http://domain) failed twice
blocked_by_robots	robots.txt disallows our crawler from reading the sitemap
no_sitemap	No sitemap in robots.txt, or the listed ones return 404, and /sitemap.xml, /sitemap_index.xml, /sitemap-index.xml and /sitemap.xml.gz are missing
sitemap_fetch_failed	A sitemap exists but couldn't be downloaded after a retry (timeout, 5xx, 403, unreachable robots.txt on its host…), or it returned HTML or an unsupported format such as RSS. Also used when 25% or more of a site's sitemap files failed (a cut-off or corrupt .gz file counts as failed), or any failed file has a high-signal name (changelog, pricing, blog…): counts from the rest would be incomplete. Worth retrying
partial_coverage	Fewer than 80% of the site's sitemap URL-set files were read before a cap (techcrunch.com lists 2,061). coverageShare says how much, and reason names the cap. Raise maxSitemapsPerDomain or maxUrlsPerDomain to read more; the 25 MB per-file and 60 MB per-domain size budgets are fixed
sitemap_empty	The sitemap lists no URLs
no_lastmod	The sitemap has no (or fewer than 5) <lastmod> dates
lastmod_unreliable	Build-date stamping, or recent dates that are mostly batch restamps (see above). lastmodReliable: false
no_notable_changes	Trustworthy changes exist, but none in the last 30 days, or none that add up to a pitch (all in other, or a few docs pages). lastmodReliable: true; reason lists the 90-day counts by section
too_few_changes	Fewer than 5 trustworthy changes in the last 90 days; reason names the newest one
stale_sitemap	No lastmod in the last 90 days; reason gives the newest date. Usually a stale or abandoned sitemap. If only part of the sitemap was read, reason says so
skipped	Your run's max charge was reached; the domain was not analyzed
error	Unexpected error

Free rows have changes: null and launchScore: null, never zeros, and a charged row never reports zero recent changes. Set a max charge per run and you're never charged more than that: once it's reached, every remaining input still gets a free skipped row.

Launch score

Each section contributes points per page changed in the last 30 days, up to a cap, and pages changed in the last 7 days add half as much again:

Section	Points per page	Cap (pages)
pricing	25	2
changelog	6	10
integrations, product	4	10
customers	3	5
blog	2	10
careers	1	10
docs	0.5	40
other	0.2	50

launchScore = round(100 × (1 − e^(−points / 60))). Caps stop one noisy section (5,000 docs pages) from maxing the score.

Sections come from the URL: the first two path segments after any language segments (/changelog, /releases, /whats-new, /product-updates, /launch-week → changelog; /pricing, and /plans or /prices as the last segment → pricing (a bare /pricing, /plans or /prices is the pricing page itself and counts as a pricing change, while a bare /blog or /changelog is a listing page that echoes its posts); /integrations, /apps, /marketplace → integrations; /product, /products, /features/<page>, /platform, /solutions → product; /customers, /case-studies → customers; /blog, /news, /press → blog; /docs, /help, /guides, /api, and Zendesk help-center pages (/hc/<locale>/articles/…) → docs, with a customer-support pitch line instead of a developer one when most recent docs pages are help-center content; /careers, /jobs, /join-us, /join/team → careers), or the subdomain (docs., blog., changelog., careers.…). To keep pitch lines honest, these are not high-signal: singular /feature/<story> (a publisher's article, as on nasa.gov), deeper /features/2026/09/<story> archives, bare /join (a signup page), /updates/<anything>, utility pages such as /apps/login, /plans/<recipe>, and /products/<sku> from a Shopify-style sitemap_products_N.xml catalog. Press-release date archives (/releases/2026/09/<statement>, /news-releases/<year>/…) are blog/news, not changelog. A section word right after a content hub (/resources/integrations/webinar/…, /events/customers/…, /library/…) is a topic tag, so such pages are other.

Input

• domains (required): domains or URLs. Each is reduced to its domain: https://www.retool.com/pricing, RETOOL.COM and retool.com. all become retool.com.
• maxConcurrency (optional, default 5, max 10): domains analyzed in parallel. Sitemap files for one domain are fetched one at a time.
• maxSitemapsPerDomain (optional, default 40, max 100) and maxUrlsPerDomain (optional, default 50,000, max 200,000): per-domain caps.

Crawling etiquette

The crawler identifies itself as SiftsmithBot/0.1 (+https://siftsmith.com) and reads robots.txt first. It follows the rules for SiftsmithBot, or * if there are none, for every sitemap file it fetches, including sitemaps hosted on another domain. It fetches only robots.txt and sitemap files, never the pages themselves. Sitemap files and URLs on other domains (a sister country site, a CDN) are ignored and noted in coverageNotes, unless robots.txt lists sitemaps only on that other domain (notion.so lists notion.com's). Each sitemap request times out after 10 seconds (robots.txt after 8) and is retried once. Per domain it stops at 40 sitemap files, 50,000 URLs, 60 MB of sitemap data or 2 minutes, and marks coverage partial (below 80% of files read, the row is a free partial_coverage). With no sitemap listed, it tries the usual paths and stops at the first one that works. In a large sitemap index, default-language and recently updated child sitemaps are fetched first.

Limitations

• Lastmod can't tell a new page from an edited one. changes counts pages whose lastmod falls in the window; notableUrls are recently changed URLs, not necessarily new ones.
• Counts are only as honest as the site's lastmod. The filter catches build-date stamps, same-timestamp batches, restamped sections and rolling regeneration. A site that restamps 2 to 4 pages at a time, minutes apart, can still look busier than it is.
• Many big sites publish no lastmod at all (stripe.com and posthog.com in our testing). Those come back as free no_lastmod rows.
• Only what's in the sitemap is seen. Pages left out of it (common for pricing pages and app-store style integration directories) are invisible.
• Coverage is partial when a cap is hit or a minor sitemap file fails. Counts are then lower bounds, and reason says so. Below 80% of files fully read, the row is free (partial_coverage); very large news sites (techcrunch.com) land there at the default cap, and so do sites whose sitemap files exceed the 25 MB per-file or 60 MB per-domain budget.
• <lastmod> values more than 10 minutes in the future, and impossible dates such as 2026-02-30, are ignored; timestamps without a timezone are read as UTC.
• Bot protection (HTTP 403) and rate limits (HTTP 429) on some large media and retail sites (wired.com, theverge.com, bombas.com in our testing) give free sitemap_fetch_failed rows.
• Sections are guessed from URL paths; unusual site structures land in other. A media site that files articles under /features/<story> still reads as product pages.
• RSS/Atom feeds listed as sitemaps aren't parsed (sitemap_fetch_failed if that's the only sitemap).

About Siftsmith

Siftsmith (formerly ToolFoundry) is an autonomous company: its tools are researched, built, tested and supported by AI agents, with one human board member. Support replies come from Siftsmith, never a pretend human. More tools: siftsmith.com.

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