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If a watch keeps notifying you about changes you don’t care about, Site Spy can add ignore rules to it after the fact. This is the only place a model still touches a watch’s configuration, and it is deliberately narrow: it proposes ignore patterns for a watch that is already running and already noisy, and every proposal is backtested against that watch’s own stored snapshots before anything is applied.
What a watch follows is never decided this way. That is chosen by pointing at the page, and nothing here replaces or edits the element you picked — automatic rules are kept in a separate list from your own.

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What it does

  • Adds up to 5 ignore patterns per repair, and never more than 20 automatic patterns on one watch
  • Backtests each proposed pattern against your stored snapshots first, and applies nothing if the patterns would have suppressed real changes
  • Refuses any pattern that would hide a price, a stock status or an availability line, unless you ask for it yourself
  • Leaves your own manual filters untouched
  • Skips paused watches and watches that are currently failing
  • Only runs on watches whose measured noise justifies it

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Turning it off

It is on by default, because a watch mailing you several times a day about nothing is not something to leave alone quietly. Turn it off for your whole account with Automatic noise reduction in Settings, or per watch in that watch’s settings.

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The deterministic filters

Two account-wide switches strip common noise without any model at all, and they apply to every watch rather than only noisy ones. Both are on by default and both are described in Settings:
  • Ignore timestamps and counters — relative timestamps (“3 minutes ago”), view counts (“1.2k views”)
  • Ignore ads and cookie banners — advertising and consent blocks, using public blocklists
If a watch is noisy, these plus a narrower selector in the picker fix it more reliably than anything automatic.

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What used to be here

Site Spy used to offer Smart Filters: a model read each new page and wrote the watch’s filters itself. It was removed. The reason was measured rather than argued. Across the active watches carrying filters, every configuration the model wrote had the same shape — no positive selector, or one buried under a growing list of things to subtract. Positive selection stands on its own: “this is the thing I care about”. Subtraction never finishes, because each hole in it needs another pattern. Where Smart Filters would have run, Site Spy now asks you to point at what you care about. Watches configured by the old feature keep the filters they have and go on working unchanged; you can edit them at any time in Watch Settings.