Website Monitoring & Real-time Change Detection

Anakin features a built-in, edge-powered website monitoring and change-detection system powered by Firecrawl. You can instruct your agents to monitor external web pages, view visual markdown diffs of what changed, receive alerts in your inbox, and trigger automated follow-up workflows.

---

1. What is Website Monitoring?

Many business processes rely on external web data that changes over time, such as competitor pricing, news directories, regulatory updates, or inventory status.

Instead of visiting these sites manually, you can register target URLs directly with your Anakin agent. Anakin schedules background crawlers to check the target websites, compares the new structure with the previous crawl, and generates a formatted Markdown diff.

---

2. Setting Up a Monitor

To register a website monitor:

1. Open your Agent Workspace from the Dashboard.

2. Select your agent.

3. Click the Globe Icon in the header navigation (the Monitors tab).

4. Enter the URL you want to monitor (e.g., https://bitcoin.org/news).

5. Choose a check frequency:

• Hourly: Recommended for high-priority pages.
• Daily: Great for standard updates.
• Weekly: Perfect for static pricing or documentation pages.

6. Click Add Monitor.

Once registered, the monitor is scheduled via Firecrawl. You can also click Run Now at any time in the monitors grid to trigger a manual check.

---

3. Webhook Change Detection & Alerts

When a monitor detects a difference in page content:

1. Markdown Diff Generation: A clean, readable markdown comparison highlighting added, removed, or modified content is compiled.

2. Execution History: The run is logged in the monitor's history log, which you can inspect directly from the monitors tab.

3. Owner Inbox Alerts: Anakin automatically inserts an alert card into the owner's inbox. Clicking the card reveals the exact markdown diff payload, keeping you updated in real time.

4. Conversation Logs: An associated system conversation is initialized to record the alert history.

---

4. Triggering Automated Workflows

The most powerful capability of the Website Monitor is its ability to trigger durable agent workflows automatically.

If you have a workflow registered under your agent, and its instruction prompt mentions either the monitored URL or the word "monitor", Anakin will invoke that workflow immediately upon detecting a change.

How to set up an automated response workflow:

1. Go to your agent's Workflows tab and click Create Workflow.

2. Give it an instruction prompt. For example:

> "Search the web for the latest developments, analyze the differences in our monitored page (https://bitcoin.org/news), and email a summary report of the additions to [email protected] using the Email Outbox tool."

3. Connect the required action tools (e.g. web_search, email_sender).

4. Save the workflow.

When the change-detection webhook fires, the workflow runs in the background. It executes your tools, generates a summary, and delivers the results (e.g., sends the email) without any manual intervention.

---

5. Enterprise Use Cases

A. Competitor Price Watcher

Objective: Track when a competitor updates their pricing table.

Setup: Monitor the competitor's pricing page daily. Create a workflow: "When pricing changes, write a quick analysis of the new price tiers and notify the team."

B. News & Sentiment Aggregator

Objective: Get instant summaries of regulatory or industry news.

Setup: Monitor industry news directories hourly. Create a workflow: "Summarize the added news items and send a daily digest email."

C. Technical Documentation Monitor

Objective: Monitor partner API documentation for breaking updates.

Setup: Monitor the developer changelog URL weekly. Create a workflow: "Verify if any new API endpoints or deprecations were added and alert the engineering channel."