Tell me when a page I watch changes
Checks the pages you list each day and emails you when the wording actually changes, with a note on what changed.
Apps it connects
Authenticate each one once and the workflow is ready to run.
What it does
The integration steps this workflow runs, in the order it first runs them.
- 1Google SheetsRead rows
- 2Jina AIRead url
- 3AnthropicGenerate model response
- 4GmailSend
- 5Google SheetsWrite row
How it works
Everything the template sets up, and what to fill in before the first run.
Checking a supplier's price list, a competitor's terms or a policy page by hand is the sort of job nobody does reliably. This workflow does it once a day: it reads each page you have listed, compares it with the copy it saved last time, and emails you only when the wording has genuinely changed - with a short note saying what is different.
Set it up with a Google Sheet whose tab has four columns, in this order: Page (what you call it), URL, Last Checked, Last Snapshot. Fill in the first two for each page you want watched and leave the last two empty - the workflow fills them in. Then paste the sheet link into 'watchListUrl' and your address into 'alertEmail'.
Most pages change a little every time they are loaded, so three things stop that reaching your inbox. Line breaks and runs of spaces are flattened before anything is compared, so formatting churn is invisible. Only the opening of the page is compared - 4,000 characters by default, which you can change in the 'excerptSize' step - so adverts, related links and footers further down are out of scope. And when the text does differ, it is read against the copy saved last time and a difference that is only an advert, a timestamp, a view count or a reordered list of reviews is not reported.
A page that cannot be read, or that comes back with less text than the 'minTextLength' step allows for, is never treated as a change: no alert goes out and the saved copy is left exactly as it was, so a blocked request or a temporary error page cannot wipe out what the page really said. The same is true when the comparison itself does not come back with a clear answer. The alert is sent before the row is written back, so an interrupted run repeats an alert rather than losing one.
The first run on a page just saves a copy and tells you nothing - there is nothing to compare it with yet.
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