Terms of service & policy monitoring
Vendors, partners and affiliate programs update their terms without much warning, and the changelog is rarely honest about what moved. SiteMonit checks the page on a schedule and shows you a word-level diff: the one sentence that changed, not a wall of legal text to re-read.
Free plan: 5 pages, checks every 15 minutes. Alerts by email, Telegram, Slack or webhook.
A pixel-diff tool that's fine for a homepage is the wrong instrument for a terms page. Legal text is dense, changes are often a single clause, and a "this page looks different" screenshot tells you nothing about what actually changed.
A revised arbitration clause or a new data-sharing sentence buried in 6,000 words is easy to miss on a manual re-read. A word-level diff surfaces exactly what was added, removed or reworded.
Most companies don't publish a diff of their own terms. Some silently update an "effective date" with no summary at all. Monitoring the actual page means you don't depend on the company telling you.
Each check is a dated snapshot. If a dispute ever comes down to "what did the terms say on that date," you have the before and after rather than a vague memory of the page.
Step 1
The terms of service, privacy policy, acceptable-use policy or affiliate agreement page — anywhere the legal text actually lives.
Step 2
Click the main content area so SiteMonit watches the legal text itself, not a rotating banner, a cookie notice, or a "last updated" widget elsewhere on the page.
Step 3
Hourly or daily is normal for legal pages — they don't change often, so there's rarely a reason to burn a 15-minute check budget on one.
Step 4
Email for a personal watch list, Slack or a webhook for a compliance team that needs it routed into a shared channel or ticketing system.
A screenshot comparison will tell you a terms page "looks different" — new paragraph spacing, a font change, a redesigned layout — none of which is legally meaningful. Text mode instead runs a word-level diff on the extracted content: unchanged wording stays plain, removed text is struck through, and new text is highlighted, the same visual grammar as track changes in a word processor. A rewritten liability clause shows up as a highlighted sentence in an otherwise unchanged page, which is the difference between reading one line and re-reading the whole document to find it yourself.
Data processing terms, SLA pages, and acceptable-use policies for tools your company depends on. A silent change to a data-retention clause is the kind of thing procurement and legal want to know about before renewal, not after.
Commission rates, cookie windows, and payout terms in affiliate program agreements change with little notice. Affiliates who watch the terms page directly find out before the next payout cycle, not from a forum post.
Usage policies, rate-limit terms, and data-use clauses for platforms a product is built on. A quiet policy change can turn a compliant integration into a violation overnight.
Journalists and analysts tracking how a company's data practices or refund policy evolve over time, especially around a product launch, funding round, or regulatory inquiry.
Any SaaS tool an employee connects to company data. Security and compliance teams use this as a lightweight, continuous check between formal vendor risk reviews.
Confirming a CMS deploy didn't accidentally revert a legal page to an old version, or that a scheduled update actually went live when it was supposed to.
Legal pages are usually the easiest pages on a site to monitor: they're static, server-rendered, and companies want them crawlable, so there's little bot protection standing in the way. The exceptions are domains with aggressive bot protection across the entire site — some banks, and platforms that gate everything behind a login wall. If a page can't be reached, SiteMonit reports that in the check result instead of quietly showing "no changes," so you're never left assuming a page is stable when it simply couldn't be checked. It's also worth noting SiteMonit reads the rendered page, not a legal database — it won't tell you whether a change is enforceable or how it compares across jurisdictions. It tells you what changed and when; a lawyer still has to read it.
A compliance or legal team watching a dozen vendor terms pages doesn't need per-user licensing — it needs enough checks per month.
billed annually, or $11.99 monthly
billed annually, or $69 monthly
A 50k plan covers up to 500 pages, enough for a full vendor and affiliate watch list. All plans.
How do I track changes to a company's terms of service?
Paste the ToS or privacy policy URL into SiteMonit, select the page (or just the body text if the page has changing ads or a cookie banner), set a check interval, and pick an alert channel. When the wording changes, you get a notification with a word-level diff of exactly what moved.
Can I monitor multiple vendors' terms at once?
Yes. Each page you watch is a separate task with its own interval and alert channel. The free plan covers 5 pages; paid plans scale to hundreds for teams tracking a full vendor or affiliate list.
Will I get alerted for cosmetic changes like a redesign?
You can select just the legal text (the article or main content block) rather than the whole page, so a new header, footer or ad doesn't trigger a false alert. A change threshold also lets you ignore single-character or whitespace-only edits.
What does the alert actually show me?
A word-level Text mode diff: unchanged text stays plain, removed wording is struck through, and new wording is highlighted, similar to Word's track changes. You see the one clause that changed instead of re-reading the whole document.
Does this work on sites that block bots?
Most legal pages are static and unprotected because companies want them indexed and readable. A minority of sites, mainly ones with aggressive bot protection on their whole domain, can block automated checks; SiteMonit reports this in the check result rather than silently showing no changes.
Free plan, no card. See also SiteMonit vs Visualping, competitor monitoring and price drop alerts.