Refresh Pilot Docs

Watch a page for changes

Monitoring is the second half of Refresh Pilot: while the page reloads on its interval, the extension reads the page after every refresh and alerts you the moment your keyword shows up, vanishes, or the page changes at all.

shop.example.com/sneakers

In stock — ships tomorrow

🔔Keyword found: "in stock"

The page refreshes on its own — and the instant "in stock" appears, it gets highlighted and you get a notification.

How it works

Monitoring rides along with a normal refresh job. After every reload, Refresh Pilot scans the page's text for your keywords. There is nothing to install or configure on the website itself — everything happens inside your browser.

  1. Open the page you want to watch (say, a sold-out sneaker page).
  2. Click the Refresh Pilot icon and open the Monitor tab.
  3. Turn on Monitor this page (it's off by default).
  4. Type a keyword — for example in stock — and press Enter to add it as a chip.
  5. Press Start. The page now refreshes and is checked after every reload.
💡 Even faster: select some text on any page, right-click it, and choose Monitor "â€Ļ" with Refresh Pilot. That starts watching the page for that exact text in one step.

The three modes

🔎 Found
keyword appears
→ đŸĢĨ Lost
keyword disappears
→ 🌀 Any change
anything changes

Pick one of three ways to watch: something appears, something disappears, or anything at all changes.

  • Found FREE — alerts when your keyword appears on the page. The classic restock watch: the page says "sold out" today, and you want to know the second in stock shows up.
  • Lost PRO — alerts when a keyword that was on the page disappears. Perfect for the reverse restock trick: watch the words sold out, and the moment they vanish, the item is probably buyable again.
  • Any change PRO — no keyword at all (the keyword box is hidden in this mode). It alerts whenever the scanned area changes in any way — great for auction pages, status boards, or a queue position that keeps moving. Tip: combine it with watching just part of a page so a rotating ad doesn't set it off.

What the free plan includes

On the free plan you get one plain-text keyword in Found mode — enough for the most common job ("tell me when in stock appears"). PRO unlocks the Lost and Any change modes, multiple keywords, and the power syntaxes (regex, XPath, CSS, boolean logic) described on the Keywords & expressions page. See the full comparison on Free vs PRO.

Templates: ready-made watches

Not sure what to type? Open the Templates ▾ dropdown in the Monitor tab. It holds 18 ready-made watches, grouped by what people most often monitor. Picking one fills in the keyword and mode for you:

CategoryExamplesMode
Restockin stock, add to cart, available now, back in stockFound
Price & dealsre:\$\d+\.\d{2} (a price like $19.99), price drop, re:\d+%\s*offFound
Appointmentsappointment available, book nowFound
Jobsnew job, we are hiringFound
Ticketstickets availableFound
Statuscss:.error-banner (Found), out of stock and sold out (Lost), plus an "any change" templateMixed
Queueyour turn, queue positionFound
â„šī¸ On the free plan, picking a template that needs a second keyword, a prefixed expression (like re: or css:), or a mode other than Found shows the PRO upgrade prompt.

How often can it alert you?

To keep alerts useful (and quiet), matches are rate-limited to one alert every 20 seconds per watched page. Even if the page refreshes every 5 seconds and the keyword is there each time, you won't get four pings in a row. Recent alerts are also collected in the Tabs dashboard feed so you can review them later.

💡 Next: plain words are just the beginning. Learn regex, XPath, CSS and boolean expressions on Keywords & expressions.