The Best Web Monitoring Tools in 2026: From Google Alerts to AI Agents
Keeping up with the web is a losing game. Between competitor updates, industry news, price changes, and regulatory shifts, there’s always something you should have caught sooner. The challenge isn’t finding a monitoring tool — it’s finding the right kind. The landscape now spans from simple page change detection to AI agents that search the web for you. This guide covers every major approach with honest trade-offs. Quick Comparison Tool Best For Pricing AI Filtering Google Alerts Basic keyword monitoring Free No Visualping Visual page change detection From $10/mo Yes (Ping AI) changedetection.io Self-hosted monitoring Free / $8.99/mo No Distill.io Browser-based element tracking Free / $12/mo No Feedly RSS reading + AI filtering Free / from $8.93/mo for AI Yes (Pro+…
