--- title: "How to Track Changes on a Website (Manual and Automatic)" description: "Ways to see when a web page changes: check it yourself, use an archive or search, or let a change monitor check on a schedule and show you what changed." canonical_url: https://peekivo.com/en/guides/how-to-track-changes-on-a-website language: en last_updated: 2026-10-01 --- # How to track changes on a website Start by deciding what counts as a change for you: any edit to the text, one value such as a price or a date, or the way the page looks. For a page you already visit, checking by hand can be enough. For anything you would hate to miss, a change monitor checks the page on a schedule and tells you what changed. ## Decide what a change means for you - Any text change. Useful for short pages such as a policy or a terms page, where every edit matters. - One value. A price, a stock status, a date or a level that sits in a known place on the page. Watching only that value ignores everything else that moves. - A new item in a list. A new press release, a new job posting or a new entry in a table of notices. - How the page looks. A changed image, banner or layout that the text alone would not show. ## Check it yourself These methods cost nothing and need no account. They suit a page you already look at regularly. - Look for the page's own date. Many pages show a "last updated" or "published" line. The site sets that date itself, so it can stay the same after an edit or change without one. - Use the site's feed if it has one. Blogs, newsrooms and many government lists publish an RSS or Atom feed; a feed reader shows each new entry. A feed covers new items, not edits to an existing page. - Compare with an archived copy. In the Wayback Machine you enter a web address and choose Browse History to see the copies it holds, each with its capture date. Copies are taken on the archive's schedule, so a short-lived change may have no copy. - Search one site. A Google search such as site:example.com plus a word you expect finds pages from that site. Google notes that the results are not a complete list of the site's pages, so a missing page proves nothing. - [Alternatives to the Wayback Machine](https://peekivo.com/en/guides/wayback-machine-alternatives) ## Let a change monitor check for you A change monitor fetches the page on a schedule, compares it with the last copy it read and tells you when the part you care about is different. The main kinds differ in where the checks run and who looks after them. - A browser extension. The checks run in your own browser, so a check that runs this way can only happen while that browser is running. - A hosted service. The provider's servers check the page and send you an email or a message. You do not need to keep anything running, and the provider's plan sets how often it checks and how many pages you can watch. - A self-hosted tool. changedetection.io is open-source software under the Apache 2.0 licence that you run yourself, for example with Docker or pip. Its project page lists a visual selector for picking part of a page and notifications to services such as email, Slack and Discord. - An uptime monitor is a different tool. It checks whether a site answers, not whether its content changed, so it will not tell you that a price or a notice is new. ## Choose what to compare Most pages change all the time in ways nobody cares about: the current date, a visitor counter, ads, rotating offers, cookie banners and A/B tests. If a monitor compares the whole page, those changes become alerts. Watching one region of the page, or one value, keeps the alerts to the change you asked about. - Text comparison shows which words were added or removed. It suits policies, notices and articles. - Field comparison reads one value, such as a price or a status, and can apply a rule to it, for example "tell me when the price is below 400". - Visual comparison looks at how the page renders. It catches image and layout changes that text comparison misses, and it is more sensitive to harmless movement. ## Make sure silence means no change A monitor that could not read the page sends no alert either. Pages block automated visits, need JavaScript to show their content or change their layout so the watched part is no longer found. Check that your monitor tells you when a read failed, and when it last read the page successfully. - [Why your website monitor stayed silent](https://peekivo.com/en/guides/why-didnt-my-website-monitor-alert-me) ## What Peekivo is built to do here - You write what you want to be told about in a sentence. Peekivo proposes a page, the part of it to watch and a rule, and nothing is watched until you approve that plan. - When the rule matches, the alert shows the page before and after the change. - Each watch shows its last attempt and its last successful read separately, so a page that could not be read never looks like a page that did not change. - Peekivo has no history from before a watch starts. For older versions of a page, use a web archive. > Peekivo is in early access. Today you can join the waitlist; there is no public sign-up yet. ## Questions ### Is there a way to track changes to a website? Yes. You can check the page yourself against its own date, its feed or an archived copy, or use a change monitor that checks it on a schedule and tells you what changed. ### How can I check the edit history of a website page? Most public pages do not publish an edit history. Web archives such as the Wayback Machine hold copies taken at different dates, which you can compare. A change monitor keeps its own dated copies from the day you start watching. ### Can you get an alert when a webpage is updated? Yes. A change monitor sends an email or another message when the page, or the part of it you chose, is different from the last copy it read. If the site has a feed, a feed reader also shows new entries. ### What is a free tool for monitoring website changes? Checking by hand, feeds and web archives are free. changedetection.io is open-source software you can run yourself at no licence cost, on a computer or server you keep running. Hosted services publish their own free and paid limits; check the current plan page before you choose. ### Is web tracking illegal? This guide is about watching public web pages for changes, not about tracking people. Whether a particular use is allowed depends on where you are and on the site's terms, and this page is not legal advice. ## Related - [Can ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity watch a web page for you?](https://peekivo.com/en/guides/can-chatgpt-monitor-a-website) - [Say what you want to be told about](https://peekivo.com/en/ask) ## Sources - [Internet Archive Help Center: Using the Wayback Machine](https://help.archive.org/help/using-the-wayback-machine/), fetched 2026-10-01 - [Google Search Central: site: search operator](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/monitor-debug/search-operators/all-search-site), fetched 2026-10-01 - [changedetection.io on GitHub (dgtlmoon/changedetection.io)](https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io), fetched 2026-10-01