Questions & answers

First we look for a feed. YouTube channels and most blogs publish one, and a feed is cleaner and gentler on the site than reading the page. If there isn’t one, we read the page itself and strip out the noise — ads, counters, navigation.

We check it immediately so there’s a baseline to compare against, then keep checking on your plan’s schedule.

• Free — once a day, at a time you choose.
• Pro — every 6 hours.
• Power — every 3 hours.

On Pro and Power, YouTube channels — any channel URL, including the youtube.com/@handleform — and feed-enabled blogs also get a push (via WebSub): when the source notifies us, those alerts can arrive within moments, ahead of the next scheduled check. It's a best-effort bonus, not a guarantee — YouTube in particular doesn't always send the push — so if one is missed, your normal 3–6 hour check still catches the change.

Pages that haven’t changed in a long time are checked less often over time, and snap back to full frequency as soon as something moves.

Plain English, as specific as you can. It’s what the AI compares each change against, so “alert me when a new chapter is posted” works better than “tell me about updates”.

Good examples: “a new episode is added”, “the price drops below $50”, “a remote React role is posted”. You can edit it anytime from the dashboard — the next check uses the new wording.

Because the AI decided the change wasn’t what you asked about. Pages change constantly for boring reasons: rotating ads, view counters, “posted 3 hours ago” timestamps. Filtering those out is the whole point — an alert should mean something actually happened.

If it’s genuinely missing things you care about, make the description more specific and it’ll judge the next change against that.

For about an hour after you add a page, we sample it a few times to learn which parts change on their own — ad slots, counters, rotating banners — so they don’t trigger false alerts later. Tracking works normally during this time; detection just gets sharper once it finishes.

We can’t sign in as you, so anything that requires an account — a private dashboard, a members-only forum, your order history — can’t be tracked. We only ever see what a logged-out visitor sees.

We read the HTML a site sends us. Most sites include their content there, but some web apps send an empty shell and fill it in afterwards using JavaScript — for those, there’s nothing for us to read, so the tracker sits quietly and never fires.

If a page looks normal to you but SurveiLN never reports anything, this is the usual reason. A feed for the same content, if one exists, is the reliable workaround.

Some sites — often behind Cloudflare — turn away anything that isn’t a person with a browser. When that happens the dashboard says “this site blocks automated checks” rather than pretending nothing’s wrong.

Paywalled articles behave the same way: we can see the teaser, not the article.

Most sites publish a robots.txt file saying which automated tools may fetch which pages. We follow it. If you try to add a page a site has asked us to stay out of, we'll tell you straight away rather than creating a tracker that quietly never works.

There's a useful exception. If the site publishes an RSS or Atom feed, add the feedaddress directly and we can usually track it — feeds are published specifically to be read by machines, and sites often keep their feed paths out of robots.txt's allowances only to stop them showing up in search results. So a blocked page doesn't always mean a dead end: look for the site's feed first.

The full details of how our crawler behaves are on our crawler information page.

After three checks in a row that fail — the page 404s, the domain stops resolving, the site blocks us — we pause the tracker instead of retrying forever, and tell you on the dashboard.

Press Resume to try again; that clears the failure count. If it pauses again straight away, the page is likely one of the cases above.

Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Brave, and Safari on macOS all work directly — nothing to install.

1. Open Settings and click Enable push.
2. Your browser asks for permission — choose Allow.
3. Click Send test to confirm a notification actually arrives.

No installation needed — notifications work from a browser tab, even when the browser is closed.

1. Open SurveiLN in Chrome (or Edge, Firefox, Samsung Internet) and sign in.
2. Go to Settings and tap Enable push.
3. Tap Allow when Android asks.

Using Brave? Brave turns off Google’s push messaging service by default, and web notifications rely on it. If nothing arrives, enable push messaging in Brave’s privacy settings, then disable and re-enable push here. Testing in Chrome first is a quick way to tell the two apart.

Apple only allows web notifications for apps added to the Home Screen — a Safari tab can never receive them. You’ll also need iOS 16.4 or later.

1. Open surveiln.com in Safari (other iOS browsers can’t install web apps).
2. Tap the Share button — the square with an arrow pointing up.
3. Scroll down and tap Add to Home Screen, then Add.
4. Close Safari and open SurveiLN from its new Home Screen icon. This is the step people miss — the app has to be running on its own, not in a browser tab.
5. Sign in, go to Settings → Enable push, and tap Allow.

If you added SurveiLN to your Home Screen a while ago, delete the icon and add it again — iOS caches the installed app. It’s also worth checking iOS Settings → Notifications → SurveiLN is allowed.

• Use Send test in Settings. If the test arrives, push is fine and the tracker simply hasn’t changed yet.
• Check you didn’t block notifications earlier — in a browser, that’s the padlock or icon beside the address bar.
• Check the operating system: Do Not Disturb, Focus modes, and per-app notification settings all silence push.
• On iPhone, make sure you opened the app from the Home Screen icon, not Safari.
• Still nothing? In Settings, Disable then Enable push again — that re-registers this device.

Push is per-device: enabling it on your laptop doesn’t enable it on your phone.

Email goes to your account address. In Settings you can choose one email per change, an hourly or daily digest, or turn email off entirely — push is unaffected either way. Digests only send when there’s something to report; a quiet day means no email.

Open Settings and click Disable to stop push on the device you’re using. Email is separate — change or switch it off in the same place.

Note that signing out does not stop notifications on a device. If you’re handing your computer or phone to someone else, disable push first.