Organisations correct the record quietly. A pledge is softened, a figure is revised, a name disappears from a leadership page, a policy document gains a paragraph. All of it happens in public, and almost none of it is announced.
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How do journalists monitor websites for changes?
Watch the specific pages that matter — a department's guidance, a company's statement, a candidate's policy page — and get alerted the same day the wording moves, with a word-level diff and a timestamped image of the page before and after. It turns a stealth edit from something you would have to notice into something that reaches you.
Stealth editing is not rare and it is not usually sinister — organisations revise pages constantly. What makes it newsworthy is the gap between what was published and what is published now, particularly when the earlier version was quoted, relied on, or promised something.
The practical problem is that nobody can check a hundred pages by hand. The pages worth watching are known in advance — a department's guidance, a company's crisis statement, a candidate's pledges — but checking them daily is work that competes with actually reporting.
This guide covers setting that up, and is explicit about what the resulting record does and does not prove.
A small, deliberate list beats a broad sweep you stop reading.
When a department is under scrutiny, its guidance pages tend to move. Watching them during the story is how you catch a revision the same day rather than after someone else does.
Statements get softened. A page that said one thing on Monday and something more cautious on Thursday is a documented change of position.
People disappearing from a leadership page is frequently the earliest public signal of a departure, well before any announcement.
Election commitments, ESG targets and published policies are all revised in place. The original wording is the thing worth having.
Where a company quietly broadens what it does with data. Slow-moving, occasionally very significant.
Worth being precise about, because this is where a monitoring tool can be oversold.
Every recorded change stores a full-page image of the page before and after, the changed wording highlighted, a word-level diff, and a timestamp. That is a strong contemporaneous record and it is usually enough to show an editor that a page changed and precisely how.
What it is not is an independent archive. The record is ours, generated by our checks, and we keep the last thirty versions of each page — older ones are deleted automatically as new ones arrive. For a page that changes twice a year that is fifteen years of history; for one that changes weekly it is about seven months.
For anything you expect to be contested, pair it with an independent archive. Submitting the URL to a public web archive at the moment you are alerted gives you a third-party record alongside ours, and costs nothing. If a defensible long-term archive is the core requirement rather than the alert, Versionista is built specifically for that and is the honest recommendation.
Our record shows what we fetched and when. An independent archive shows what a third party fetched. For a contested story you want both, and the second one takes ten seconds at the moment the alert arrives.
Four limits worth knowing before you rely on it.
A hosted checker reads public pages. Court databases, subscription sources and member areas are out of reach.
Many official documents are PDFs. We watch the page that links to them, so a replaced or renamed document shows as a change, but the text inside is not compared.
A page edited and put back within your interval is invisible. Shorter intervals narrow the window but never close it.
We compare text. A changed photograph or a redesign that keeps the same words will not alert, though the stored images will show it.
Set up an alert and a dated record for changes to a public page.
We load it and show it back to you exactly as we fetched it.
Click the statement, guidance or policy body so navigation and cookie banners are ignored.
Hourly or daily is fine for background watching; five minutes when a page is under scrutiny.
Email on any plan, plus browser push to a phone lock screen, and Slack or a webhook on paid plans.
Submit the URL to a public web archive as soon as a change lands, so a third-party record exists alongside ours.
Each change stores a timestamped before-and-after image with the changed wording highlighted.
Typically about 3 minutes from start to finish.
Uptime monitors, watched pages and heartbeats each get their own allowance, so adding a page watch never costs you a monitor. SSL and domain checks ride along with the monitor they belong to and use nothing extra.
| Plan | Monitors | Watched pages | Heartbeats | Fastest interval | Alert channels | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 1 | 1 | 1 | Every 30 minutes | 1 email address | $0 |
| Founding Member first 20 only | 25 | 25 | 25 | Every 5 minutes | Email + webhook & chat | $5/mo |
| Basic | 10 | 10 | 10 | Every 10 minutes | Email + webhook & chat | $8/mo |
| Growth | 50 | 50 | 50 | Every 5 minutes | Email + webhook & chat | $19/mo |
| Pro | 100 | 100 | 100 | Every 60 seconds | Email + webhook & chat | $34/mo |
Annual billing is cheaper on every paid tier. The pricing page is the authoritative list.
Every recorded change is compared word by word and kept with a before-and-after image. This is the real output, shown with worked example data.
Price fell from $49 to $39, and an annual discount was added.
The item is available again and the basket button returned.
A new subprocessor was added in another jurisdiction.
The free plan sends to one email address. Every paid plan adds the chat and webhook channels below, with 2 to 10 destinations depending on the plan. However many alerts you receive, the price does not change — nothing here is metered or charged per alert.
There are no voice calls and no SMS. If a phone call at 3am is a hard requirement, say so before you subscribe — we would rather tell you now than refund you later.
Watch the page directly. Select the guidance text, choose a check interval, and you are alerted with a word-level diff and a timestamped image the same day the wording moves — rather than relying on noticing it yourself.
It is a strong contemporaneous record: timestamped images before and after, plus the exact words added and removed. For a story you expect to be contested, pair it with an independent public archive submitted at the moment of the alert, so the evidence does not rest solely on our record.
The last thirty versions of each watched page. For a page that changes rarely that is many years; for one that changes weekly it is roughly seven months. If a permanent archive is the actual requirement, Versionista is built for that and we are not.
Not their contents. We watch the page linking to them, so a new, replaced or renamed document appears as a change — often the signal you need — but the text inside the PDF is not compared.
If both happen between two of our checks, we will not see it. Shorter intervals narrow that window; five-minute checking makes it small, but no external monitor can eliminate it.
One on the free plan, 25 on the $5 Founding Member plan, 50 on Growth and 100 on Pro. There is no monthly check quota, so watching them frequently during a live story costs nothing extra.
No. A hosted change detector reads publicly reachable pages, and we do not ask for your credentials to subscription sources.
It is reading published pages, which is what browsers and search engines do. We request pages at a modest rate and identify ourselves honestly rather than disguising the traffic.
Last updated August 4, 2026 · Written by Amit Gupta, founder of MonitoringDaddy
Free plan covers one page, no card. $5/mo covers 25, checked as often as every five minutes.