Getting Started with SiteGauge: Your First Monitor in 5 Minutes

SiteGauge watches any web page for you and tells you, in plain language, when something meaningful changes: a price moves, a feature launches, a policy is reworded, a homepage is rewritten. You don't have to check pages by hand, and you don't have to read a wall of raw HTML to work out what actually moved.

This guide gets you from a blank account to your first working monitor in about five minutes. All you need is one URL you care about.

Step 1: Add your first monitor

From your dashboard, choose Add monitor and paste the URL of a page you want to watch. A competitor's pricing page is a great first choice, because it carries a lot of signal and changes rarely. Give the monitor a name you'll recognise later, like "Acme pricing".

SiteGauge captures the page straight away so you have a baseline. From that point on, every future check is compared against what came before.

Step 2: Scope it to the change that matters

Most pages carry things that change for reasons you don't care about: rotating testimonials, swapped logos, a "trending now" strip. If you watch the whole page, those trigger alerts and you quickly learn to ignore them.

So narrow the monitor to the part that matters. You can track the whole page, a specific section, or a single element like the pricing table. Scoped tightly, a new customer logo never masquerades as a price change. If you'd like to eyeball two versions by hand first, the free HTML and text diff tool shows you exactly what moved between two captures.

Step 3: Choose how often to check

Match the check frequency to how fast the page really moves and how much it matters. A simple default:

• Pricing and product pages in a fast-moving market - hourly to daily.
• Homepage and key landing pages - daily.
• Careers, about, and policy pages - weekly.

You can change this any time, so start conservative and speed it up if a page turns out to move more than you expected.

Step 4: Route the alert to where your team works

A change is only useful if a person sees it. Choose where alerts land: email works on every plan, and Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, and webhooks are available on paid plans so changes drop straight into the channel your team already lives in. Assign an owner so no alert dies in a shared inbox.

What happens when something changes

On the next check after a real change, SiteGauge does three things: it captures a fresh version, shows you a before-and-after visual and text diff so you can see exactly what moved, and adds a plain-language summary that says what changed and how much it matters. That last part is the point - you're reading a one-line verdict, not decoding a diff. There's more on how that scoring works in signal, not noise: AI change detection.

Going further: whole sites and new pages

Once your first monitor is running, two options help you cover more ground without adding pages one at a time:

• Track a whole website discovers a site's pages from its sitemap and watches them as one monitor, so a large site doesn't eat your monitor slots.
• Track new pages watches a competitor's sitemap and alerts you when they publish something new, which often previews a launch before any announcement.

Both respect your plan's limits, so you'll be asked to pick within your allowance rather than being surprised later. When you're ready to go deeper, how to monitor competitor websites covers which pages carry the most signal.

Build the weekly habit

The teams that get the most from monitoring spend fifteen minutes a week reviewing what changed and what they did about it. Give each competitor an owner, keep alerts flowing to a channel people actually read, and that short weekly loop turns a stream of changes into a habit your team trusts. Our documentation covers every setting in more detail when you need it.