How to monitor a website for changes without code

To monitor a website for changes without code, sign up for a hosted monitor, paste the page URL, say what you care about, and pick where alerts go. AyeWatch does all of that in plain English and runs in the cloud, so you need no scraper, no cron job and no laptop left switched on.

The rest of this guide walks through the setup, what to write in the description, and when another tool is the better fit.

Step by step in AyeWatch

1. Create an account. The free preview needs no credit card, so you can test a real page before paying anything.
2. Choose a webpage monitor. Paste the URL of the page you want to watch: a product page, a careers page, a pricing page, a policy page.
3. Describe the change you want. Write it the way you would say it to a colleague: "tell me when the price drops below $200" or "tell me when a new senior designer role appears". This is the part that replaces CSS selectors and XPath.
4. Pick a schedule. Choose a check interval your plan allows. Paid plans can also use Auto mode, which checks more often while a page is busy and slows down when it goes quiet.
5. Pick a channel. Push notifications and the in-app feed come with every plan. Email, Slack, Discord and webhooks are on paid plans.

When something matching your description changes, you get a short brief that says what happened, with the source to open and check.

Why the description matters

A classic change monitor compares two copies of a page and flags any difference. That catches the edit you wanted, plus every rotating banner, date stamp and cookie notice. After a week of that, most people stop reading the alerts.

AyeWatch reads the change for meaning rather than matching keywords, then checks it against what you asked for. A page can change ten times and you hear about the one edit that fits your rule. You are not the only one doing this kind of filtering, either: PageCrawl, for example, scores each change by importance and lets you set a threshold.

Other no-code ways to watch a page

Visualping, Distill and PageCrawl all have free plans. If you mainly want a visual before-and-after of one page, a tool like Visualping is the more direct choice. If you want the alert to tell you whether the change matters, start with AyeWatch.

What it costs

AyeWatch paid plans start at $9 a month, billed in monitoring credits, after the free preview. Faster ASAP checks are on the higher plans, so if you need near-instant alerts, check the pricing page before you pick a tier.

A few pages worth watching first

• A competitor's pricing page, for new tiers or cuts.
• A retailer's product page, for restocks or price drops.
• A government or exam portal, for new dates and forms.
• A company careers page, for the role you are waiting on.

Start with two or three. You can add more once you trust the alerts.

FAQ

Do I need to know HTML or CSS to monitor a page? No. With AyeWatch you describe the change in a sentence. Tools that use selectors, like Distill, let you click on the page instead of typing code.

Will monitoring stop if I close my laptop? Not with a cloud monitor. AyeWatch checks pages on its own servers and sends alerts to your phone.

Can I get alerts in Slack? Yes, on a paid AyeWatch plan. Push and the in-app feed work on every plan.