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A watch pointed at a whole page alerts on every cookie banner, visitor counter and timestamp on it. The picker is how you avoid that: Site Spy shows you the page and you point at the part you care about. Only changes inside it reach you. Nothing is guessed. What you point at is saved as the watch’s Monitor Only selector, and you can read it back later in Watch Settings.

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Where it opens

The dashboard and the chat use the same picker: Site Spy loads the page in a real browser, takes a picture of it, and shows it to you as it actually looks. The other two work differently and are described further down.

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Clicking one element

Move the pointer over the picture and the element under it is outlined, with a caption naming the tag and the selector that would be saved. Click to lock that choice. The bar below the picture then shows the selector and the text of what you picked.
  • Track This Element saves it, and stays disabled until something is chosen
  • Re-select lets go so you can point somewhere else
  • Cancel closes the picker without creating anything
The keyboard does the same job. Click the picture once to focus it, then the up and left arrows widen the selection to the smallest element containing the current one, and the down and right arrows narrow it to the largest element inside it. Enter confirms, Escape lets go of the selection, and Escape again leaves the picker.

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Suggested elements

Where a page offers obvious candidates they appear as chips above the picture — Price, Availability, Heading — and clicking one selects that element exactly as a click on the picture would. They come from inspecting the page itself: the price chip from an element carrying a currency amount, the availability chip from wording like “In stock” or “Sold out”, the heading chip from the most prominent heading rather than the first one found. No model is involved, and a wrong suggestion costs you a glance, because you see it highlighted before you accept it.

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Dragging a box around an area

Some things are not one element — a block of three lines, a row of details, a panel. Press and drag across the picture to draw a box around them instead of clicking. What gets saved is not the box. Every element sitting entirely inside it is collected, the ones already contained by another are dropped, and the smallest element in the page that holds all the rest becomes the watch’s anchor. That is a single selector, and it keeps working when the contents inside it are rewritten. A press without movement is still a click, so there is no mode to switch: point for one element, drag for an area.

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”Just this one” or “the whole list”

A click inside a feed, a product grid or a slider raises a question that no selector can answer on its own, so the picker asks it in plain words:
That is item 3 of 12 in a list.
  • Just this one follows position 3, so it changes when the list reorders. This is what you want when the slot is the thing you care about — the current top story, the first search result
  • The whole list follows the container, and tells you when any item is added, removed or edited
The click itself selects the single item, so leaving the question alone keeps that. Choosing the other option swaps the selection to the list. The question only appears where there really is a list: three or more sibling elements of the same shape. A two-column layout is not a list and is not treated as one.

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You cannot finish without choosing

There is deliberately no button that creates a whole-page watch from the dashboard. The one exception is an address that is not a page at all — a JSON or plain-text response has no parts to point at, so the picker says so and offers to watch the whole response instead. If the page cannot be rendered, the picker tells you that too. Some sites block us and some are simply too slow for a render. Try the address again, or a different page.

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Picking on a watch you already have

Open a watch’s settings and click Pick it on the page instead under Monitor Only. This screen works from the snapshot Site Spy already stored rather than from a fresh render, and that is the point: the checker compares exactly those bytes, so anything visible here is something a filter can actually match. Styling and images are not loaded, so the page looks plain. Click an element and press Watch only this. Arrow keys walk out to the parent element and in to the first child, and Escape clears the selection. If the watch already follows something, you are asked to confirm before it is replaced. There is no box-drag and no list question on this screen — it is a click picker over the stored page. Two states can stop it being useful:
  • No check has run yet — there is nothing stored to point at. The page fills in once the first check finishes
  • The page returned no content — the site builds itself with JavaScript, so a plain fetch stored nothing. Use a browser fetch switches the watch over, and the next check stores something you can pick from
The same screen carries the other way of narrowing a watch: name the message shown while you are waiting — “Sold out”, “No appointments available” — and nothing is sent while that text is on the page. Tick the box below it to be emailed once, the moment the text disappears.

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The extension picker

The browser extension picks on the live page in front of you rather than on a picture of it. Hover to highlight, click to lock, then Track This Element, Re-select or Cancel in the bar that appears. Enter confirms and Escape lets go, then leaves. The watch is created with the selector already filled in. See Watching Pages. It does not offer the box-drag or the list question — those belong to the dashboard and chat picker.

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What the choice means afterwards

Because you chose the selector rather than a model writing it, Site Spy treats it as yours. Smart Filters never replace it, and automatic noise repair leaves it alone. If the element stops appearing on the page, the watch reports a broken filter and emails you about it instead of quietly widening back to the whole page — see Watch Health. You can still edit or replace the selector by hand in the Monitor Only field. See CSS & XPath Filters for the syntax.