Automate Tracking AI News in Real-Time with Just a Few Lines of Code

The field of Artificial Intelligence moves at lightning speed. New models, research papers, and product updates are released daily, making it a challenge to keep up. Manually checking multiple websites for the latest AI news is time-consuming and inefficient.

Supacrawler's Watch API offers a powerful solution, allowing you to automate this process and receive real-time notifications when important AI news breaks. With just a few lines of code, you can monitor your favorite AI news sources and stay ahead of the curve.

This guide will show you how to set up a watch job to track AI news from popular sources like TechCrunch and Hugging Face Daily Papers.

Goal

Create a monitoring job that automatically checks AI news websites for new articles and sends an email alert as soon as updates are detected.

curl -X POST https://api.supacrawler.com/api/v1/watch \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "url": "https://techcrunch.com/category/artificial-intelligence/",
    "frequency": "hourly",
    "selector": ".post-block__title__link",
    "notify_email": "[email protected]",
    "notification_preference": "changes_only"
  }'

How It Works

1. URL: We provide the URL of the TechCrunch AI news section.
2. Frequency: We set the job to run hourly to catch news as it breaks.
3. Selector: This is the key to precision. Instead of monitoring the whole page (which includes ads, timestamps, and other dynamic content), we use the CSS selector .post-block__title__link. This tells Supacrawler to only watch the list of article titles for changes.
4. Notify Email: Your email address is specified to receive alerts.
5. Notification Preference: By setting this to changes_only, you ensure you only get an email when a new article title appears.

Within an hour, Supacrawler will perform its first check. When a new article is published on TechCrunch AI, its title will appear on the page, changing the content within our target selector. Supacrawler will detect this change and immediately send you an email notification.

More Ideas for Tracking AI News

You can apply this same pattern to monitor any AI news source. Here are a few more examples:

import requests
import os

API_KEY = os.environ.get("SUPACRAWLER_API_KEY", "YOUR_API_KEY")

response = requests.post(
    "https://api.supacrawler.com/api/v1/watch",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {API_KEY}", "Content-Type": "application/json"},
    json={
        "url": "https://huggingface.co/papers",
        "frequency": "daily",
        "selector": "article", # Each paper is in an <article> tag
        "notify_email": "[email protected]"
    }
)
print(response.json())

import requests
import os

API_KEY = os.environ.get("SUPACRAWLER_API_KEY", "YOUR_API_KEY")

response = requests.post(
    "https://api.supacrawler.com/api/v1/watch",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {API_KEY}", "Content-Type": "application/json"},
    json={
        "url": "https://openai.com/blog",
        "frequency": "daily",
        "selector": "h3", # Blog post titles are in <h3> tags
        "notify_email": "[email protected]"
    }
)
print(response.json())

Tips for Effective AI News Monitoring

• Be Specific: Use the most precise CSS selector possible to avoid false positives from ads or dynamic timestamps.
• Choose the Right Frequency: For breaking news, hourly is great. For research papers or blog updates, daily is usually sufficient and conserves credits.
• Monitor Multiple Sources: Create separate watch jobs for each of your go-to AI news sources to build a comprehensive, automated monitoring dashboard.

By leveraging the Supacrawler Watch API, you can build a powerful, automated system to stay on top of the rapidly evolving AI landscape without ever having to hit "refresh" again.