What “changed” means

A regulatory landscape moves, and the most valuable thing Regulatory Snapshot does from your second scan onward is tell you what moved since you last looked. But “what changed?” is a treacherous question for any research product, because two very different things can change between runs: the world (a regulator published something) and the report (this run’s analysis selected differently). Most tools blur the two. Regulatory Snapshot’s Change Monitor is built around keeping them apart.

Where you meet it

The Change Monitor is the What’s changed card on the Overview tab. When the loaded snapshot has a predecessor — an earlier scan of the identical scope — the card compares the two and says so plainly: compared with your scan 21 days earlier. When it has no predecessor, it tells you that too:

No historic identical scan — nothing to compare against. Re-run this configuration to track change over time.

That message is the whole story of baselines. Change is defined between snapshots in the same series; the first scan of any scope has nothing to be compared against, and editing the scope — the jurisdictions or the areas — starts a new series with a fresh (empty) baseline. The horizon and the engine are not part of scope: change either and the series, and its baseline, continue.

The three strata

1. Confirmed regulator events

The top stratum — and the only one allowed to headline the card — is regulator activity backed by a dated document. Each row names the kind of event, the instrument it concerns, and a provenance chip: the regulator, the publication date, and a link to the document itself. The event vocabulary is deliberately small:

If nothing confirmed happened in the window, the card does not manufacture a headline. Instead it shows an affirmative null: a quiet line of what the regulators in your scope actually published in the period (regulator and count), so “no confirmed change to your instruments” is distinguishable from “nobody looked”.

2. Coverage movements

Each scan is a fresh analytical pass, and a fresh pass makes fresh editorial selections. The second stratum reports how the composition of your report moved, without dressing it up as change in the world:

• Newly observed — an instrument appears in this run that earlier runs did not surface. Every such row carries an honest sub-label: in force before your window — newly shown, not new, or documented in this window — see confirmed events, or no dated document on record. The first of those matters most: a rule from years ago surfacing for the first time is new coverage, not new law.
• Not shown this run — an instrument earlier runs surfaced is absent from this one, annotated with how often it has appeared (surfaced in 3 of 4 runs — likely selection). Absence from a run is usually selection pressure in a bounded report, not repeal.

A composition note keeps the arithmetic visible — this scan surfaces N of M tracked instruments — and the whole stratum lives collapsed under the card’s detail view, because composition is context, not news.

3. Unverified assertions

Sometimes a scan asserts regulator activity that cannot be tied to a verifiable source document. These claims are not discarded — you can read them under unverified assertions from this scan, each marked source not verifiable — but they can never reach the headline. The rule that organises all three strata is: nothing headlines without a dated document.

Following one instrument

Items in a snapshot are bound to tracked instruments — the named rules and regimes the Change Monitor reports on. From an item’s detail card you can jump straight to the Change Monitor focused on that instrument: the card expands, announces Showing activity for [instrument], and filters its lists to that instrument’s events, with a small timeline of the window’s activity. If there is nothing on record, it says exactly that — no recorded activity in this window — rather than leaving a blank.

The comparison itself is recomputed each time you open it, so an older snapshot’s change view quietly benefits from later improvements in event coverage rather than being frozen with whatever was known on scan day.

The weekly loop

The Change Monitor is why teams put their core scope on a schedule. The first scan is the expensive read — the full briefing, top to bottom. From the second run, the reading order inverts: open the change card, absorb the confirmed events (minutes, not an hour), skim the coverage movements for anything mislabelled as familiar, and only then decide whether the full dashboard needs a fresh read. Ten runs in, the series is your record of the period — each snapshot a fixed observation, each change card the certified delta between two of them.

For API callers

A changes overlay is exposed as a sub-resource of the snapshot at GET /v1/snapshots/{id}/drift — a legacy endpoint name retained for compatibility, glossed as changes between snapshots. One difference from the card is worth knowing: the overlay is recorded with the snapshot at scan time, whereas the card’s view is recomputed on read. The response is the recorded overlay, or { "available": false } when the snapshot had no baseline. See the snapshots API reference.

Where to go next

• Scans and snapshots — series, and why identical scope is the price of a baseline.
• Items, sources and citations — the provenance machinery the confirmed stratum is built on.
• Scheduled scans — putting the loop on a cadence.