How to know when a website is updated
You want to know if a page is fresh. Maybe it's a price list, a set of rules, a school notice or a competitor's homepage, and you need to know when it last changed, or you want to hear the moment it changes again. There's no single button for this, but there are a few good clues. Here's what each one tells you, and where it falls short.
1. Look for a date on the page
Start with the obvious. Policies and terms usually say “Last updated” or “Effective from” near the top or bottom. Blog posts and news articles show when they were published, and sometimes when they were edited. Price lists and guidance pages often have a date in the footer.
Treat it as a clue, not proof. Some sites only change the date for big edits, and some print today's date on every page automatically, which tells you nothing. If the date is today and the page looks exactly like last week, that's probably what's happening.
2. Check for a feed
Blogs, news sites, podcasts and many changelogs publish an RSS or Atom feed: a list of new posts with dates, which a feed reader checks for you. Look for a feed icon, or try adding /feed or /rss to the site's address.
Feeds are great for new posts and useless for edits. They won't tell you a pricing table changed or a paragraph was added to the terms.
3. Read the sitemap
Most sites publish a sitemap for search engines, usually at /sitemap.xml. It lists the site's pages, and many include a “lastmod” date for each one. Open it in your browser and look for the page you care about.
It's a handy hint, especially for spotting brand new pages. But plenty of sites set every page to the same date whenever anything is published, so if every entry says the same day, the dates don't mean much.
4. Look it up in the Wayback Machine
The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine at web.archive.org keeps saved copies of billions of pages. Paste the address and you'll see a calendar of the days it was saved. Open two copies and compare them to narrow down when something changed.
Popular pages are saved often; small ones may only be saved every few months, or never. Our guide to seeing what changed on a web page shows how to compare old copies, and our free “What changed on this page?” tool does the comparison for you.
5. Use search engine date filters
Search for site: followed by the address, for example site:example.com, then use the search tools to show only results from the past day, week or month. It's a quick way to see which pages a search engine noticed recently.
Remember what it measures: when the search engine last looked, not when the site changed. It can lag by days, and it won't tell you what changed.
6. Get told automatically next time
Every method above is detective work after the fact. If a page matters to you, the reliable answer is to have it checked on a schedule and get a message when it changes. A website change monitor keeps a copy of the page each time it looks, compares it with the last one and tells you what's different.
With ChangeGist you paste the page's address, choose how often to check (hourly is plenty for most pages) and get an email that says what changed in plain English, like “Deadline moved from 31 January to 28 February”. Dates, counters and other noise are filtered out, and you can write a rule such as “only tell me when the price changes” so you only hear about what you care about.
Which one should you use?
- To see when a page last changed: check the date on the page, then confirm with the Wayback Machine.
- To spot new posts on a blog or news site: use its feed.
- To find new pages anywhere on a site: read the sitemap, or try a search engine date filter.
- To hear about the next change, edits included: set up a change monitor.
Good to know
Only watch public pages, keep checks to a sensible pace and respect each site's rules. An automatic check every few minutes is rarely needed; most pages change a few times a month at most.
Comparing services? Read our side-by-side comparisons: Visualping alternative, Distill alternative, Best website change monitors 2026.