Description
ChangeScout helps product managers, marketers, founders, researchers, customer success teams, and operations teams track changelogs and release notes automatically without manually checking product update pages every week.
Add the changelog URLs you want to monitor, choose your preferred AI provider, and ChangeScout will fetch the latest updates, detect meaningful changes, and generate easy-to-read summaries you can review in WordPress or receive by email.
This is useful for:
- Product managers who want to monitor competitor features, releases, and roadmap signals
- Marketers who want to track product launches, positioning changes, and messaging updates
- Founders who want a quick view of market movement without reviewing long changelog pages
- Researchers and analysts who want structured summaries of product changes across multiple tools
- Customer success and support teams who want to stay aware of updates that may affect customers
- Operations teams who want a lightweight way to monitor important tools and platforms
Key Features
- Multi-URL tracking — monitor multiple changelog pages from plugins, SaaS tools, documentation sites, or product update pages
- AI summaries — generate readable summaries using Google Gemini, OpenAI, or Anthropic Claude
- Scheduled emails — receive changelog summaries weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly
- Force send — fetch and email the latest changelogs on demand without waiting for the next schedule
- Change detection — only send summaries when the source content actually changes
- Custom SMTP — use Gmail or any SMTP server for more reliable delivery
- Auto-detect — try common changelog and release-note URLs automatically from a domain
- Dashboard widget — review recent summaries directly from the WordPress admin dashboard
External Services
This plugin connects to third-party services to fetch and summarize changelog content.
Google Gemini API
Used when you choose Gemini as your AI provider. Extracted changelog content is sent to Gemini to generate a summary.
* Service: https://ai.google.dev
* Terms: https://ai.google.dev/terms
OpenAI API
Used when you choose OpenAI as your AI provider. Extracted changelog content is sent to OpenAI to generate a summary.
* Service: https://openai.com
* Privacy Policy: https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy/
Anthropic Claude API
Used when you choose Claude as your AI provider. Extracted changelog content is sent to Anthropic to generate a summary.
* Service: https://anthropic.com
* Privacy Policy: https://www.anthropic.com/privacy
Jina Reader (r.jina.ai)
* Service: https://jina.ai
* Privacy Policy: https://jina.ai/legal/
Screenshots

General settings screen for AI provider and changelog URL configuration 
Notification settings for email schedule and delivery options 
SMTP configuration screen for custom email sending setup 
Changelog preview and testing tools inside the plugin settings 
WordPress dashboard widget showing recent changelog summaries at a glance
Installation
- Upload the
changescoutfolder to/wp-content/plugins/ - Activate the plugin through the Plugins menu in WordPress
- Navigate to Tools > ChangeScout
- Enter your AI provider API key (Gemini, OpenAI, or Claude)
- Add your changelog URLs to track
- Configure your notification email and schedule
FAQ
-
Which AI providers are supported?
-
Google Gemini (free tier available), OpenAI GPT-4, and Anthropic Claude. You need to provide your own API key for the chosen provider.
-
No. Force-send is completely independent from scheduled emails. It bypasses the cache and sends immediately without updating the change-detection hash, so scheduled emails still fire normally.
-
How do I set up Gmail SMTP?
-
Enable 2-Factor Authentication on your Google account, then generate an App Password at myaccount.google.com/apppasswords. Use
smtp.gmail.com, port587, encryptionTLS, and enter your Gmail address and the App Password.
Reviews
There are no reviews for this plugin.
Contributors & Developers
“ChangeScout – Track Changelogs & Product Updates Automatically” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
ContributorsTranslate “ChangeScout – Track Changelogs & Product Updates Automatically” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
1.0.4
- Updated the public plugin title on WordPress.org while keeping the admin menu label short as ChangeScout
1.0.3
- Improved changelog extraction for embedded Featurebase and Next.js changelog pages
- Improved AI summary guidance for more human-friendly, source-grounded summaries
- Moved the ChangeScout admin page under Tools in WordPress admin
- Fixed admin styles and scripts loading on the new Tools page
- Kept changelog URL handling limited to 4 entries consistently
- Sorted embedded changelog entries by date so the latest release is selected correctly
1.0.2
- Fixed the send time dropdown labels to display clean times like 8:00 AM
1.0.1
- Fixed settings fields that were not persisting correctly after save
- Fixed notification email field saving
- Fixed SMTP enable/disable setting persistence
- Fixed dashboard widget refresh behavior
1.0.0
- Initial release
- AI-powered changelog summaries with Gemini, OpenAI, and Claude
- Auto-detect changelog URLs from any domain
- SMTP configuration with test button
- Eye toggle for API key and password fields
- Force-fetch isolation from scheduled emails
- Content extraction via Jina Reader
