Understanding Change Detection

How It Works

When you create a monitor, CheckSite goes through several stages to understand and track your page:

1. First check: CheckSite visits the page with a real browser, extracts the content, and creates a baseline snapshot. It also analyzes the page structure to understand what kind of site it is (blog, pricing page, documentation, etc.).
2. Context generation: Based on the page analysis, CheckSite creates a tailored monitoring strategy — it knows which parts of the page matter most and what kind of changes to look for.
3. Ongoing checks: At your chosen frequency, CheckSite revisits the page, extracts the content, and compares it to the previous version using content hashing.
4. Smart analysis: When a change is detected, the content difference is analyzed to determine what changed, whether it's significant, and what category it falls into.

What Gets Detected

CheckSite is designed to catch meaningful changes such as:

• Price changes on product or pricing pages
• New blog posts or content updates
• Documentation or policy changes
• Product availability or stock status changes
• Job posting updates
• Terms of service or legal text modifications

Noise Filtering

Not every page change is meaningful. CheckSite automatically filters out common noise:

• Timestamps and "last updated" counters
• Session tokens and dynamic IDs
• Ad content and tracking pixels
• Random element ordering (e.g., shuffled product grids)

This means you get notified about real changes, not false alarms from dynamic page elements.

Change Categories

Every detected change is automatically categorized. Common categories include:

Categories appear as badges in your dashboard and are included in all notification channels, making it easy to quickly understand what kind of change occurred.

Smart Summaries

Instead of showing raw content diffs, CheckSite provides human-readable summaries that explain:

• What changed (e.g., "The Pro plan price increased from $19 to $29")
• Where on the page the change occurred (focus areas)
• Why it matters based on the page context

Change Evidence

When a change is detected, CheckSite extracts the surrounding text for each focus area to show you exactly what changed. Each change includes:

• Before: The previous value with surrounding context from the page
• After: The new value with surrounding context

This before/after evidence is available in your change history and included in email notifications, so you can verify changes at a glance without visiting the page.

Smart Summary Limit (Free Tier)

Free users receive 15 smart summaries per month in email notifications. After the limit is reached, emails will show "Changes were detected" with a prompt to upgrade.

• The full summary is always stored in your change history — nothing is lost
• Upgrading to Pro unlocks all past summaries instantly
• The counter resets on the 1st of each month
• Pro users get unlimited smart summaries

Monitoring Persona

Set your role, industry, and goals to personalize all analysis. Your monitoring persona affects change summaries, significance scoring, and action recommendations across every monitor.

Available to all users (Free and Pro). You can set your persona via Settings > > Monitoring Profile, or through the prompt that appears after creating your first monitor.

Custom Monitoring Prompts

Pro users can add a custom monitoring prompt to each monitor. This lets you tell CheckSite exactly what to watch for:

Change History

Every detected change is stored in your monitor's history. You can access it from the monitor detail page by clicking View Change History.

Check Frequencies

How often CheckSite visits your page depends on your plan:

• Free: Once per day (every 24 hours)
• Pro: Every hour, 2 hours, 4 hours, 8 hours, or daily

You can change the frequency for each monitor individually from its settings page.