December 15th, 2022

Monitoring entire web domains for any changes (often for compliance purposes) can be a challenging proposition as a single (often immaterial) change impacts multiple or all webpages (i.e. updated copyright date change, new menu or nav item, etc.). In these instances, ChangeTower will identify and record that change across all of the site's monitors. While that is of course by design, it can often be burdensome for the person tasked with reviewing each notification for unique updates that may in fact be important.

This newly developed feature will allow Enterprise users to request that ChangeTower scan its recent change notifications and identify those that are seemingly identical (or *very* similar) and once identified, allow users to mark all of these notifications as reviewed in a single action.

This feature is still in beta and only available to select Enterprise customers but do let us know if you would like to get early access!

Here's how it works:
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​1. Initiate the scan for similar notifications:

2. Select a date range for the similarity check

ChangeTower will only look for very similar notifications in this selected date range. In case you re-run the similarity check for the same date range, ChangeTower will display those notifications to you again, even if they have previously been marked as reviewed. To avoid this, we recommend narrowing the date range to only include new notifications. More on this here.

3. ChangeTower will perform a search in the background and let you know of similar notifications detected

Click the "Review Now" button to look at the notifications
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4. You will get a list of monitors that have similar notifications.

5. Click on a notification to review the detected change

6. Confirm that the other notifications contain the same change, and then optionally, bulk mark those notifications as important or reviewed:

This is a very important step during the similarity check setup. Our tool will only look for the notifications in the selected date range, and then display very similar notifications created only within that selected date range. You will then be able to review those notifications, as outlined in the steps above.

The importance of this step really is reflected in the scenario where you want to run a similarity check after you've already done it before. In this case, you will NOT want to run the check within that same date range you did before. You will want to run the check in the new date range, the one that did not have the similarity check performed before.

If you run the similarity check in the same date range two or more times, the system will, by design, display the notifications that have already been reviewed, and you will be presented with the opportunity to review them again. While we understand that once notifications are reviewed the first time, there's no need to review them again, we want you to be able to "go back in time" and check the similar notifications that have been introduced at any point in time (even if you have already reviewed them).