How to Track Changes to Terms of Service and Privacy Policies

Step by step

1. List the policies that matter

   Typically: terms of service, privacy policy, data processing agreement (DPA), acceptable use policy, and subprocessor list for each vendor you depend on.

2. Add each policy page in Site Monitor

   Click Add site, paste the policy URL, and name it clearly — for example "Acme — subprocessors".

3. Turn on change detection

   Tick "Notify me when page content changes". To ignore headers, footers, and cookie banners, add a selector for the policy body, such as main or article.

4. Use a daily or hourly interval

   Policies rarely change more than once a day, so the Free plan's hourly checks are more than enough.

5. Review changes when you're alerted

   The email names the policy that changed. The AI summary in the dashboard describes which clauses were added, removed, or reworded, so you can decide whether legal needs to look.

You choose which alerts each URL sends — downtime, content changes, slow responses — and we email you when they happen.

What you'll need

• The URLs of each vendor's public policy pages
• An email address (or a shared inbox for your legal or security team)
• Optional: a selector for the main policy text

Why policy changes are easy to miss

Most vendors announce major policy changes by email, but smaller edits — a new subprocessor, a changed retention period, a reworded liability clause — are often published quietly with only an updated date at the top. If you're responsible for vendor risk or compliance, those are precisely the changes you need to see.

Policy pages are long, which makes spotting a one-sentence edit by eye almost impossible. Automated monitoring compares the whole text on every check and alerts you to any meaningful change.

Keeping a record

Every detected change is recorded in the site's alert history with its date, which gives you a simple log of when each vendor's policies changed. Paid plans also keep screenshot history, so you have a visual record of the page over time.

Routing alerts to the right people

Alerts are sent by email on every plan, so pointing them at a shared legal or security inbox is the simplest setup. Paid plans can also send alerts to Slack or a webhook, which is useful if you track vendor changes in a ticketing system.

Which vendor pages to watch

Start with the vendors that hold or process your customers' data: hosting, email delivery, payments, analytics, support desks, and CRM. For each, the pages that matter most are usually the privacy policy, the data processing agreement, and the subprocessor list — a new subprocessor is often something you're contractually required to review.

Next, watch the terms of service and acceptable use policy for any tool your product depends on, including API terms for platforms you integrate with. Changes there can affect pricing, rate limits, or what you're allowed to build.

Many vendors keep these documents on a dedicated legal or trust page. If the documents are PDFs linked from that page, watch the page that lists them — a new link or a changed date is a strong sign the document changed.

Ignoring the parts that change without meaning anything

Legal pages often include cookie banners, navigation, language pickers, and a "last updated" date that some sites refresh on every deploy. To avoid alerts for those, add a CSS selector for the document body — main, article, or a class like .legal-content usually works. Whitespace-only changes never trigger an alert.

Frequently asked questions

Related

• Use cases: Privacy & ToS
• Features: AI summaries
• Features: Change detection
• Guides: Get notified when a website changes