What is an alert or notification?
An alert or notification is an automated message that tells you when something important happens with your web scraping job. Instead of manually checking your scraped data every few hours, you get a ping the moment something changes or goes wrong.
Think of it as a watchdog for your data. You set the conditions, and when those conditions are met, the system sends you a message through email, Slack, webhooks, SMS, or other channels.
Why alerts matter in web scraping
Web scraping often runs on autopilot. You set up a scraper to pull product prices, job listings, or inventory data on a schedule. But what happens when a competitor drops their price by 20%? Or when a website changes its structure and breaks your scraper?
Without alerts, you might not notice for days. With alerts, you know within minutes.
Here are the most common scenarios where alerts save you time and money:
- Price changes: Get notified when a competitor changes their pricing so you can respond quickly
- Stock availability: Know immediately when out-of-stock items become available again
- New content: Receive updates when new products, job postings, or articles appear on monitored pages
- Scraper failures: Find out right away when your scraper encounters errors or blocked requests
- Data anomalies: Catch unusual patterns like sudden spikes or drops in the data you collect
Common notification channels
Different situations call for different delivery methods. Here are the most popular options:
- Email: Best for non-urgent updates and daily or weekly summaries
- Slack or Microsoft Teams: Great for team collaboration where multiple people need visibility
- Webhooks: Perfect for triggering automated workflows in other tools like Zapier, Make, or custom applications
- SMS: Reserved for critical alerts that need immediate attention
Setting up effective alerts
The key to useful alerts is being specific. Too many notifications and you start ignoring them. Too few and you miss important changes.
Start by asking yourself: What change would actually require me to take action? If a product price drops by 1%, probably not worth an alert. But a 15% drop? That might be worth knowing about immediately.
Good alert rules include:
- Price decreases greater than a specific percentage
- Items returning to stock after being unavailable
- New listings matching specific keywords
- Scraping errors occurring more than a set number of times
- Data not updating within an expected timeframe
How Browse AI helps with alerts
Browse AI makes setting up alerts simple, even if you have no coding experience. When you create a monitor to track changes on any website, you can configure notifications to alert you through email or webhooks whenever the data changes.
For example, you can monitor a competitor's pricing page and get an email the moment any price changes. Or track a job board and receive Slack notifications when new positions matching your criteria appear.
The platform handles all the technical complexity behind the scenes. You just tell it what to watch and how you want to be notified. Visit Browse AI to set up your first automated monitor with alerts in minutes.
Best practices
Keep these tips in mind when configuring your alerts:
- Start with fewer alerts and add more as needed
- Use different channels for different urgency levels
- Include relevant context in the alert message so you can act without checking the full data
- Review and adjust your alert thresholds regularly based on what actually matters
- Set up failure alerts for every scraper to catch issues early
