crawlforge-change-tracking

CrawlForge Change Tracking

Detect when a web page changes over time using the track_changes tool. Useful for competitor pricing, regulation updates, product availability, and any page you need to watch for edits.

When to use

• "Track changes to this page" / "watch this URL"
• "Tell me when competitor pricing changes"
• "Detect when this content updates"
• "Diff this page against last week's version"
• "Notify me when product availability / a regulation changes"

Core workflow

track_changes is one tool driven by an operation parameter (cost: 3 credits per call).

1. Create a baseline the first time:

{ "tool": "track_changes", "params": { "url": "https://example.com/pricing", "operation": "create_baseline" } }

1. Compare later to get the change percentage + diff:

{ "tool": "track_changes", "params": { "url": "https://example.com/pricing", "operation": "compare" } }

compare is the default operation. It returns a change percentage and a structured diff against the stored baseline.

Scoping to part of a page

Use trackingOptions to ignore noise and focus on what matters:

{
  "tool": "track_changes",
  "params": {
    "url": "https://example.com/pricing",
    "operation": "compare",
    "trackingOptions": {
      "granularity": "element",
      "customSelectors": [".price", ".plan-name"],
      "excludeSelectors": [".timestamp", ".ad"],
      "ignoreWhitespace": true
    }
  }
}

granularity: page, section (default), element, text. Toggle trackText, trackStructure, trackLinks, trackImages. Set significanceThresholds (minor/moderate/major) to classify change size.

CLI: crawlforge track https://example.com --selector ".price" --threshold 1.

Scheduled monitoring & notifications

create_scheduled_monitor repeats compare on a schedule and notifies on change. It comes in two kinds.

Local (default): persisted in ~/.crawlforge/monitors/; fires in-process only while this MCP server runs (missed runs catch up on restart; crawlforge monitor:run-due from system cron guarantees firing). Notifies by webhook or Slack — never email. goal (plain-English LLM judge) and notificationThreshold apply to local monitors only.