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How to read a detected change
Major, Notable and Minor, the one-line explanation, and the before-and-after underneath. What each part is telling you, and what Rival Radar deliberately ignores.
Updated November 9, 2026
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Every change in the feed has the same four parts: who it was, which page, how big it is, and a sentence saying what happened. Open it and you get the page's address and the before-and-after underneath.
The point of the sentence is that you shouldn't have to read a diff to know whether to care. The diff is there when you do.
Step by step
Scan the feed
The Dashboard lists every change across every competitor, newest first. A blue dot means you haven't opened it yet.
Read the severity
Major, Notable or Minor, with a coloured edge down the left of the card. Severity is about how much the change matters, not how many words moved.
Read the sentence
Under the name is one line explaining what changed and why it matters, written from the actual before-and-after rather than from the page as a whole.
Open it for the detail
Click the card. It expands to show the page's address and the before-and-after, and marks itself read.
Read the before-and-after
Removed text is struck through in red, added text is highlighted in green, and the surrounding text is there for context.
Go and look at the page
Click the address to open the real page in a new tab. Worth doing on anything you're about to act on.
What the three severities mean
- Major: something that changes how you sell against them. A price, a plan being added or dropped, a feature moving between tiers.
- Notable: a real change worth knowing about. New wording on a features page, a changelog entry, a repositioned headline.
- Minor: a small edit. A typo fixed, a word swapped, a date bumped.
A price or a percentage changing on a page you've marked as Pricing is always at least Major. That floor is set by a plain rule before anything else looks at the change, so a pricing change can be pushed up in severity but never quietly pushed down.
Severity is what your email threshold filters on. Notable and major changes is the default and is the right setting for most people. See email and Slack alerts.
What gets ignored on purpose
A plain page-diff tool treats every byte the same, so a rotating testimonial sets off the same alert as a rewritten pricing table. That's how people learn to ignore alerts.
Before anything is compared, Rival Radar strips the parts of a page that aren't the page: scripts and styles, navigation, banners and footers, and the usual furniture that changes on every load. What's left is the text a reader would actually see.
If that text is identical to last time, nothing is recorded at all. You won't see a change in the feed just because their server sent slightly different HTML.
If there's no before-and-after
An opened change sometimes says No detailed diff available. That happens on the oldest changes and on ones where the page was re-baselined, for example after an improvement to how pages are cleaned up.
The sentence and the severity still stand. Only the side-by-side text is missing.
Questions
Why did a change take longer to arrive than my check frequency?
New content has to be seen on two checks in a row before it counts, so a one-off bad fetch can't be reported as a competitor editing their page. That adds one check interval to a real change. See how often pages are checked.
Who writes the one-line explanation?
It's written by AI, from the before-and-after text only, not from the page as a whole and not from anything else about the competitor. There is more detail on the data sources page.
Why did I get a Minor change I don't care about?
Your severity threshold is probably set to Every change. Set it to Notable and major changes on the notifications page and minor edits stay in the dashboard without emailing you.
Can I mark something unread again?
No. Opening a change marks it read and that's one way. The feed is ordered by date rather than by read state, so nothing disappears on you.
Where did archive changes go?
Changes reconstructed from the Internet Archive are kept out of the live feed on purpose, so months of old history don't bury today's news. They're on each competitor's History card instead.
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