Content Change Monitoring

Content change monitoring periodically fetches a web page, extracts its visible text content, and compares it to the previous snapshot. When the content differs beyond a configurable threshold, an alert fires.

How It Works

1. A scheduled job fetches the target URL over HTTPS.
2. The page HTML is parsed and visible text is extracted (scripts, styles, and hidden elements are excluded).
3. A similarity score is calculated comparing the new text to the stored snapshot.
4. If the score drops below your significance threshold, a CONTENT_CHANGE alert is triggered.
5. The new snapshot is saved as the new baseline.

Setting Up Content Monitoring

1. Open the domain detail page.
2. Click the Content tab.
3. Click Add Monitored URL.
4. Enter the full URL (e.g., https://example.com/pricing).
5. Set the check frequency: daily or weekly.
6. Set the significance threshold:
   • 5% — catch even minor edits
   • 20% — only flag substantial rewrites
   • 40% — ignore small updates, flag major structural changes
7. Enable the alert and save.

What It Catches

• Defacement — an attacker replacing your homepage content with their own
• Competitor pricing changes — monitor a competitor pricing page for updates
• Terms of service updates — be notified when a supplier or partner updates their terms
• CMS content drift — catch unintended edits by team members
• SEO content changes — detect when page copy drifts from what was optimized

Reading Change Alerts

When a change is detected, the alert includes:

• The URL that changed
• The similarity score (e.g., 0.72 = 72% similar to previous)
• A timestamp of when the change was detected
• A link to the Content tab showing before/after comparison

Tips

• Set the significance threshold at 10-15% to avoid false positives from dynamic content (timestamps, ad rotations, personalized recommendations)
• For business-critical pages (login page, checkout), use a 5% threshold and daily checks
• For competitor monitoring, weekly checks are sufficient and conserve credits
• Use daily checks only for pages where early detection is critical