Track competitor page changes with daily Slack alerts

Every weekday at 8am, monitor a set of competitor web pages for meaningful changes and alert my team in Slack. I keep the pages I want to track in a Google Sheet, one row per page, with columns for the page URL, a short label (for example 'Acme pricing' or 'Acme homepage'), the last captured text of that page, and the date it was last checked.

For each tracked page, use Browserless Smart Scrape to load and read the fully rendered page content so JavaScript-heavy sites still work. Then read that page's previous capture from the Google Sheet with Get Values, and compare the new version against the stored one.

Before comparing, normalize both versions so cosmetic noise does not create false alarms: ignore whitespace and formatting differences, timestamps and dates, rotating banners, promo bars, visitor counts, and anything else that changes on every load. Then judge whether the difference is material, meaning a new price, a new plan or feature, or a shift in positioning or messaging, rather than cosmetic churn.

When a change is material, post a Slack message with Send a Message that summarizes exactly what changed. Keep it specific and human: name the page, describe the before and after (for example, the old price versus the new price, or the plan that was added), explain in one line why it matters, and include a link to the page. Do not send an alert for cosmetic changes.

After handling each page, overwrite that page's stored capture in the sheet with today's version using Update Values, and update the last-checked date, so the next run compares against the most recent snapshot and the same change is never reported twice. If a page has no stored capture yet (a newly added row or the very first run), save the current version as the baseline without sending an alert.