Filters & descriptions

The single biggest lever you have over alert quality is the monitor description. It's the prompt our LLM uses to decide whether a change is meaningful — so write it like you'd brief a teammate.

Anatomy of a good description

A useful description usually has three pieces:

• What the page is. “Competitor pricing page”, “our docs changelog”, “jobs board for the data team”.
• What you want to know about. “Plan price or quota changes”, “new releases”, “new roles opening”.
• What you want to ignore. “Ignore copy edits and design changes”, “ignore the ‘X minutes ago’ timestamps”.

Examples that work

Competitor pricing:

Pricing page for competitor X. Alert me when:
- any plan price changes
- a plan is added or removed
- quotas / limits change (seats, API calls, storage)
Ignore copy tweaks, A/B testing layouts, and rotating testimonials.

Product changelog:

Public changelog for our biggest competitor.
Alert me when a new release entry is added.
Ignore typo fixes to old entries.
The summary should mention the feature name and one-sentence pitch.

Jobs board:

Engineering careers page for the company.
Alert me when a new senior or staff-level role is posted.
Ignore non-engineering roles and re-postings of existing listings.

Examples that don't work

• Too vague. “Tell me when this changes” — you'll get every diff including boilerplate.
• Too narrow. “Alert me only if the price of the Enterprise plan changes from $499” — works once, then your monitor is broken. Describe the kind of change, not a specific value.
• Contradictory. “Alert on any change, but ignore minor changes” — be explicit about what minor means.

Iterating on a monitor

You can edit a monitor's description at any time. The new description applies to the next check, not retroactively. If you keep getting noisy alerts:

• Open the alert and look at the diff. The summary tells you what the LLM thought was meaningful.
• Add an explicit “ignore X” clause for that pattern.
• If a whole section of the page is always noisy (a carousel, a “recently viewed” widget), consider switching to a more specific URL that loads just the content you care about.