AI monitoring: live lookup and smart alerts

Most of the data you actually want to track has no API. It lives on a product page, a retailer's listing, a government website, or a news article. The Live lookup and Smart alert widgets let you monitor any of it in plain English, on a schedule, with instant notifications when something changes. No scraping code, no API subscription, no data pipeline.

Two widgets, one workflow

Live lookup tracks a value. You ask a question, Claude AI searches the web, returns the current answer, and stores it over time so you can chart how it moves.

Smart alert watches a condition. You describe the situation you care about, and the moment it becomes true you get a browser push notification. No threshold sliders, no boolean logic to configure.

Add both to the same dashboard for complete coverage: one widget tracks the value, another fires when it crosses a point you care about. They run independently on whatever schedule you set.

Live lookup: tracking values that have no API

Most data that matters lives outside structured APIs. A price comparison site, a government form page, a retailer's product listing, a job board — none of these offer a feed you can subscribe to. Live lookup treats the entire public web as a data source. You write a question, and the answer becomes a live widget that updates itself.

1. Click + Add widget and select Live lookup.
2. Type your question in plain English in the What do you want to track? field.
3. Optionally fill in Mark as down when… to turn the widget red and trigger a notification if a specific bad state occurs.
4. Save. The widget runs the lookup immediately and displays the result.

Example questions

These are the kinds of values that Live lookup is built for — things you would otherwise check manually:

• "Price of a Big Mac in London in GBP"
• "Average rent for a 1-bedroom apartment in Lisbon, Portugal today"
• "Price of a gallon of regular gasoline in Los Angeles right now"
• "Current price of a business-class flight from New York to London this week"
• "Current electricity price per kWh for households in Germany"
• "Current wait time to renew a US passport"
• "Price of a 12-pack of Red Bull on Amazon US today"
• "Number of active job listings for React developer on LinkedIn"
• "Average price of a used 2019 Toyota Camry on eBay right now"
• "Current price of a 500ml bottle of Pepsi at a UK supermarket"

The result can be displayed as a plain text value, or charted over time to see how it has moved across days or weeks. All 8 display modes are available: text, line chart, candlestick, bars, histogram, heatmap, event feed, and stacked bar.

Smart alert: getting notified without writing rules

Standard alerting tools require you to define an exact threshold against a specific data field. Smart alert takes a different approach: you describe the situation in plain English, and Claude evaluates whether it is currently true on each check. This means you can express conditions that would be impossible to configure as a rule.

1. Click + Add widget and select Smart alert.
2. Write the condition in the Alert condition field.
3. Turn on Search online so the AI can look up current data to evaluate it.
4. Set the Notification cooldown — the minimum time before the same alert fires again.
5. Make sure you have notifications enabled to receive alerts.

Example conditions

The real power is in conditions no alerting tool could previously express:

• "The price of a Big Mac in London is above £5"
• "A 1-bedroom apartment in Lisbon is listed for under €1,200 per month"
• "The cheapest business-class flight from New York to London this month is below $3,000"
• "Regular gasoline in Los Angeles is above $5 per gallon"
• "The current US passport renewal wait time is above 12 weeks"
• "There are more than 50,000 open React developer job listings on LinkedIn"
• "The price of a 12-pack of Red Bull on Amazon has dropped below $18"
• "Electricity in Germany is above €0.35 per kWh"

Cooldown options

The cooldown controls how often you can be notified if a condition stays true across multiple checks:

Pairing lookup with alert

Add a Live lookup widget to chart a value over time, and a Smart alert on the same page to notify you when it crosses a threshold. They are independent — the alert runs its own web search rather than reading from the lookup widget, so there is no dependency between them and you can set different intervals for each.

Example setup: a Live lookup at 6h tracking the current rent for 1-bedrooms in Lisbon, charted so you can see the trend, and a Smart alert at 6h that fires when a listing appears below your target price. Both widgets sit side by side on the same page.

Interval and credit planning

AI widgets call Claude on every check. Use longer intervals for values that change slowly.

For most real-world prices and slow-moving data, a 6h or 24h interval is sufficient and very credit-efficient. For conditions where timing matters, the minimum interval is 1h on Free and shorter on Pro. See Credits for plan details.

Embedding a live lookup widget

Live lookup widgets can be embedded on any website with a single iframe, like any other 7di widget. Useful for displaying a live price or stat inline on a blog post, a comparison page, or a public research dashboard. See Embedding a live lookup for the embed code and theme options.