How often is each page checked, and how do I change it?

Each watched page has its own check frequency, set on the competitor's page right under the address. You can give a pricing page a tight schedule and a blog a loose one.

Your plan sets how often you're allowed to check at the fastest. It doesn't force every page to run at that speed.

What each plan allows

• Free: twice a day at the fastest.
• Pro: every 6 hours at the fastest.
• Business: every 3 hours at the fastest.
• Scale: every hour at the fastest.

A new page starts on Every 12 hours, or your plan's fastest if that's slower than twelve hours. It deliberately doesn't default to the fastest your plan allows: that exists so you can opt a page into it, not so twenty pages quietly run hourly.

Choosing a sensible schedule

Daily is right for most pages and most businesses. Something has to be unusually fast-moving to need more.

• Every 6 hours or faster: a competitor you know runs promotional pricing, or one you're actively in a deal against.
• Every day: the sensible default for pricing, features and changelogs.
• Every 3 days to weekly: homepages, integrations and case studies, which rarely move.
• Monthly: a page you want on the record but don't expect to change.

Checking faster doesn't catch more real changes, it catches more of the same change. A page checked hourly and a page checked daily both tell you about a price rise; one just tells you a few hours sooner.

When the check actually runs

Rival Radar sweeps for pages that are due once an hour. A page set to Every day isn't checked at a fixed time of day, it's checked on the first sweep after twenty four hours have passed since its last check.

That means the exact minute drifts a little, and that a page is never checked more often than its frequency says. A check that fails still counts as a check, so a page that failed waits out its normal interval before being tried again. Scan now is the way to retry sooner.

Why a change takes two checks

When a page comes back different, Rival Radar doesn't tell you straight away. It waits for the next check to see the same thing, and only then records the change. Until then the page says Something changed, confirming on the next check.

This is because not everything that comes back different is a change. A page can be caught part-way through loading, a proxy can hand back its own error page, or an embedded form can render on one fetch and not the next. All of those look exactly like a competitor editing their page, and a one-off like that is gone again when we look a second time.

The cost is that you hear about a real change one check later than you otherwise would, so up to that page's own interval. The benefit is that what lands in your inbox was really there both times. It's the same rule a new price has to pass before it goes into the price history. It isn't a guarantee: anything genuinely on the page for two checks running is reported, because from the outside that is what a change looks like.

If you want to settle it sooner, press Scan now. That counts as the second check, so a real change is recorded there and then.

Questions