How to monitor a website for changes as an SEO, in five steps
Which competitor and client pages to watch, how to write AyeWatch rules that skip noise, and where to send the alerts.
By ClaudeGPT Si Newsroom, Editorial team··3 min read
Here is how to monitor a website for changes as an SEO: list the pages whose edits affect your rankings or your clients, add each one to AyeWatch with a one-sentence rule describing the change that matters, and route the alerts to the channel where you plan work. The rest of this guide covers which pages to pick, how to phrase rules, and how to keep the alerts useful.
Search work depends on things other people change. A competitor rewrites the page that outranks you. A client's developer edits a template and drops the FAQ block your answer snippet relied on. A partner moves the page you link to. You usually find out from a ranking drop, weeks later.
Step 1: choose the pages worth watching
Not every URL needs a monitor. Start with pages where a content change has a clear consequence:
| Page | Why it matters | Example rule |
|---|---|---|
| Competitor page ranking above you | Their rewrite can explain your movement | "The main sections, headings or comparison table change" |
| Competitor pricing or features page | AI answers and comparison queries quote it | "A plan, price or feature is added or removed" |
| Competitor blog or resource index | Shows which topics they are targeting next | "A new article is published" |
| Your client's money pages | Unplanned edits can remove content that ranks | "Any section of body copy is removed or rewritten" |
| Pages you earned links from | A removed mention means a lost link | "The mention of our brand or link is removed" |
Five to ten pages is a good first batch. Add more once you trust the alerts.
Step 2: write rules, not keywords
Classic page monitors compare snapshots and alert on any difference. On a competitor's blog index, that means an alert whenever a sidebar widget shuffles. AyeWatch reads the new version of the page and checks it against the sentence you wrote, so the rule does the filtering.
Good rules are specific about the change and silent about everything else:
- Weak: "tell me about changes to this page".
- Better: "a new comparison section or table is added, or an existing one is removed".
Each alert comes with a short summary of what changed, which you can paste straight into a client update or a ticket.
Step 3: set the speed
Most SEO pages do not need fast checks. A daily or weekly interval is enough for competitor content, and Auto mode will adjust the interval for you based on how busy a page is. Save faster intervals for launches you are tracking closely. ASAP mode is available on the higher AyeWatch plans.
Step 4: send alerts where work happens
Push and the in-app feed are included on every plan. Paid plans, from $9 a month and billed in monitoring credits, add email, a daily digest, Slack, Discord, webhooks and a REST API. A common setup is one Slack channel per client, with each monitor sending its alerts to the matching channel.
Step 5: review after two weeks
Look back at what fired:
- Rules that fired on noise need tightening.
- Pages that never changed can move to a slower interval.
- Alerts that led to action are your template for new monitors.
Keep a simple log next to the alerts: the date, the page, what changed and what you did about it. After a few months that log becomes a record of how competitors adjust their pages, which is useful context when a client asks why rankings moved.
What this does not replace
A content monitor tells you when the words on a page change. It is not a rank tracker or a crawler, so keep your existing tools for positions, indexation and technical audits. If you need a screenshot of exactly what moved in a layout, a visual tool such as Visualping shows that better than a written summary.
Getting started
Add the one competitor page you check most often, write a rule for it, and see what the first alert tells you. AyeWatch's walk-through on watching any website for updates covers the same setup from the general side.