Smart Monitor — AI Change Detection

Monitor any web page for changes. When something changes, AI tells you what happened and why it matters — in plain language. No more cryptic diffs.

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🚀 What it does

1. Add URLs — one or more web pages you want to watch
2. Set a schedule — run this Actor every hour, day, or week (Apify scheduler)
3. Get AI summaries — when a page changes, you get a clear explanation:
   • "The pricing page updated: Enterprise plan went from $999 to $799/mo and a new 'Startup' tier was added at $299/mo"
   • "Product page: Out of stock badge appeared on the Sony WH-1000XM6"
   • "Careers page: 3 new job postings added (Senior Backend Engineer, Product Designer, Sales Lead)"

🔍 Why use it?

Problem	Solution
Manual checking = waste of time	Automatic monitoring, AI does the reading
Diff tools show HTML gobbledygook	Plain English summaries of what changed
Competitor moves fast	Get notified instantly when they change pricing, features, or positioning
Too many pages to watch	Monitor unlimited URLs in one run

🧠 How it works

• Scrapes the page text content
• Compares with the previous snapshot (stored in Apify KV store)
• Summarizes changes with AI (your own OpenAI API key)
• Reports every URL's status in the output dataset

Change detection modes

• Full page — monitors the entire visible text content
• CSS selector — targets a specific element (e.g., .price, #product-title, .offer-card)

📥 Input

Field	Required	Description
URLs	✅	Web pages to monitor
Detection mode	✅	Full page or CSS selector
CSS selector	Conditional	Required if mode is CSS selector
OpenAI API Key	Optional	Your key for AI summaries. Without it, you get raw diffs only
Model	Optional	Default: gpt-4o-mini
Language	Optional	Summary language (English, French, Spanish...)

📤 Output

Each run produces a dataset with one row per URL per run:

Field	Description
url	The monitored URL
status	initial, unchanged, changed, skipped, error
impact	low, medium, high, or unknown (AI-estimated)
summary	AI-generated summary of changes (in your chosen language)
diff_preview	Raw diff (first 1000 chars)
timestamp	When the check ran

📅 Scheduling

This Actor is designed to run on a schedule. Set it up in the Apify Console:

1. Run once to capture the initial baseline
2. Go to Schedules → create a daily/hourly schedule
3. The Actor will only report pages that actually changed

🔑 API key

Optional. Provide an OpenAI API key to get AI summaries. Without it, the Actor still detects changes and reports status: changed — just no summary. Get your key at: https://platform.openai.com/api-keys

💰 Pricing

Rental model — $19/month (coming soon). One price, unlimited URLs per run.

Apify platform usage credits apply for compute + storage (snapshots stored in KV store).