# Monitoring Without AI: Turning AI Features Off Source: PageCrawl.io Help Center URL: https://pagecrawl.io/help/features/article/monitoring-without-ai Published: 1 September, 2026 --- AI in PageCrawl is an optional layer on top of change detection, not the thing that detects changes. If your organisation has not approved AI processing yet, or you simply do not want it, you can switch it off and keep monitoring pages normally. This page explains where the switches are, what changes, and what does not. ### Can PageCrawl run with AI completely disabled? Yes. Change detection itself never uses AI. Pages are fetched on a schedule, the new capture is compared against the previous one, and a change is recorded when the comparison differs. AI only ever reads a change after it has already been detected, to describe and score it. With AI off, no page content is sent to any AI provider at any point. ### Where are the AI switches? There are three levels. They stack, and the broadest one wins. 1. **Team (all workspaces at once).** Settings → Team → Features has a single AI toggle. Turning it off disables AI everywhere in the team, including AI summaries, priority scoring, change feedback, and AI access through the MCP integration. This is the switch to use when the decision is organisation-wide. 2. **Workspace.** Settings → Workspace → AI has its own toggle, plus separate controls for the individual features (change summaries and importance scoring) so you can keep one and drop the other. A workspace toggle cannot re-enable AI while the team switch is off. 3. **Page or template.** Each monitored page has an AI summaries setting, and templates carry a default that new pages inherit. Use this to exclude specific confidential pages while the rest of the workspace keeps AI. Turning the team switch back on restores each workspace to whatever it was set to before, so you do not have to reconfigure anything. **Change Feedback** is a fourth toggle, in Settings → Team → Features, covered on its own below. It is separate from the AI switch because it also controls the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons themselves. ### Can you keep AI summaries but never let AI filter alerts? Yes, and this is often the setting people actually want. Summaries and importance scoring are separate toggles in Settings → Workspace → AI. Leave summaries on and turn importance scoring off, and AI will describe changes without ever deciding whether you hear about them. Two things can hold a notification back once AI is on, and both are yours to switch off: 1. **Minimum importance.** If a change scores below the minimum set for the workspace, monitor, or template, it is recorded but does not notify. 2. **Learned patterns from change feedback.** If you previously marked a similar change as noise, matching changes on that site stop notifying. Setting the minimum importance to **0** switches off both at once. Zero means "notify me about every change", so neither the score nor a learned pattern can hold anything back. This is the single setting that gives you the full guarantee. The two toggles each close only one path, so switching off just one is not equivalent: | Setting (with AI on) | Filtered by importance? | Filtered by learned patterns? | |---|---|---| | Default (minimum importance 20) | Yes, below 20 | Yes | | Importance Scoring off | No | **Yes, still active** | | Change Feedback off | **Yes, still active** | No | | Minimum importance set to 0 | No | No | | Importance Scoring and Change Feedback both off | No | No | With Importance Scoring off, no score is generated at all, so old scores cannot silence anything either. With minimum importance set to 0, scores are still generated and shown, they just never hold a notification back. Note: the default minimum importance for a new workspace is 20, so on a workspace with AI enabled some low-scoring changes are filtered out of the box. Check that setting if you expect to be notified about everything. ### Are filtered changes lost? No. A change held back by importance or by a learned pattern is still detected, still recorded, and still visible in the page's history with its full comparison and screenshot. Only the notification is suppressed. Nothing is deleted, and nothing is hidden from reports or the API. This matters if you need an auditable record: what you are turning on or off is the alerting, never the evidence. ### How do you turn off learned patterns from feedback? Change Feedback is its own toggle in Settings → Team → Features, separate from the AI switch. It controls the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons on changes, and marking something as noise teaches a pattern so similar future changes on that site stop notifying you. Turning Change Feedback off does three things: it hides the thumbs buttons, stops new feedback being recorded, and stops every pattern already learned from filtering anything. Existing patterns are left in place rather than deleted, so turning the toggle back on restores them exactly as they were. Note: this toggle is the one that governs learned patterns, not the AI switch. Patterns come from feedback you gave explicitly, so turning AI off on its own leaves them applying. If you have used the thumbs buttons before and you want a guarantee that nothing is being muted, turn Change Feedback off as well, or set the minimum importance to 0. These patterns are stored per workspace and per site. They are never shared between workspaces, between teams, or between customers, so a pattern learned in your account only ever affects your account. There is currently no single button to erase every learned pattern at once. To clear an individual one, open the change you gave feedback on and press the same button again, which removes what that feedback taught. ### What still works without AI? Everything that is not the summary or the score: - Change detection, text diffs, and highlighted differences - Tracked elements, including price, number, availability, and presence types - Visual comparison and screenshots - Web archiving (WACZ) - All notification channels: email, Slack, Discord, Teams, Telegram, webhooks - Scheduled reports and digests, including shared report links and PDFs - Folders, labels, workspaces, and the review board - The REST API, the browser extension, and RSS feeds Alerts still arrive when the next check detects a change, on the same schedule as before. ### What do you give up? - **Plain-language change summaries.** Instead of a sentence describing the change, you get the comparison itself. - **Importance scoring.** New changes are no longer scored, so nothing is filtered by a minimum importance threshold. Notifications follow your normal rules instead. - **AI digest headlines.** Report digests still include a written summary, generated from the change data rather than by a model. - **AI setup suggestions.** You choose what to track on a page yourself instead of accepting a suggestion. ### What does the summary look like with AI off? The summary block on a page's history stays where it is, headed simply **Summary**, and shows the detected difference directly. For example: - `Membership costs 100 → 250 euros` for a text change, with the changed part highlighted - `Availability: In Stock → Out of Stock` - `12.5% visual difference` for a visual monitor Nothing in the interface is labelled as AI-generated, because nothing is. ### Does this affect data already processed? No. Summaries and scores generated while AI was enabled stay on those past changes, and reports covering that period still show them. Turning AI off stops new content from being sent; it does not delete existing history. If you need more control over where content goes rather than switching AI off entirely, you can connect your own provider key instead. See the [BYOK setup guide](/help/integrations/article/ai-byok-setup-guide.md). ### Related Articles - [How PageCrawl Uses AI](/help/features/article/how-pagecrawl-uses-ai.md) - What AI produces and how to interpret it - [AI-Powered Change Detection and Smart Filtering](/help/features/article/ai-powered-change-detection.md) - What the AI layer adds when it is on - [AI Integration Setup Guide (BYOK)](/help/integrations/article/ai-byok-setup-guide.md) - Connect your own AI provider key --- Need more? The complete PageCrawl.io help center, with every article, is available as a single document at https://pagecrawl.io/llms-full.txt. Read it for context on anything this page does not cover.