What Marketplace alert timing actually means for your city

Crawlbench checks Facebook Marketplace for your search on a schedule set by your plan, and the alert goes out on the next check that finds a listing passing your filters. That holds in every city on the search, whether you buy in one metro, a handful of cities, or nationwide.

The question that matters for your city is simple: how soon after a listing goes live do you know about it, and is the alert worth opening?

Crawlbench is not affiliated with Meta. Here is what Crawlbench's alert timing means for the city you buy in.

The scenario that makes timing matter

A clean truck posts at 9:07 on a Tuesday morning, priced a few thousand under the usual price. In a competitive metro, that listing can collect its first "Is this available?" quickly. Whether you were the first message or the fifteenth mostly comes down to when you learned it existed.

Facebook's own saved-search notifications are built for re-engagement, not latency, and Facebook publishes no timing for them. Serious buyers end up asking the timing question about whatever tool they use instead. Fair. Here is our answer.

How alert timing works for your city

Crawlbench checks busy cities every 10 minutes on Starter, every 5 on Growth, every 2 on Pro and every minute on Scale, as pricing shows on 18 October 2026. An alert goes out on the check that finds the listing. We have not measured the time from a seller's post to your alert, so we do not quote one.

How far your search reaches depends on how you scope it:

• Single city. Your search covers your city's new listings, and a listing that passes your filters reaches you on the next check.
• A handful of chosen cities. Same story: every city on the search is checked at your plan's speed.
• Nationwide. One search covers the whole country, so a deal three states away is checked on the same schedule as one across town.

Plans differ by how many searches you get (3 on Starter, 8 on Growth, 20 on Pro) and by how often they check. Within a plan, the speed is the same for every city you add. The setting that decides your results is your filters: tight filters mean every alert is worth opening.

Every listing runs through your filters (price, year, excluded terms, and a recency window). Listings that pass land in your results with the reasons attached and a price comparison against similar active listings. Alerts go out for fresh listings, so a brand-new search fills your results with what is already on the market without flooding every channel. Price-cut alerts on listings you already have reach you when the seller drops the price.

What this means if you are the buyer

• Scope is a coverage decision, not a speed decision. Every city on a search is checked at your plan's speed, so add the cities you would actually drive to, or go nationwide for sourcing breadth.
• A search beats notification luck. An alert with strict filters will beat waiting for a saved-search push that batches with the rest of your Facebook notifications.
• The floor matters more than the average. Manual checking has great latency while you are staring at the feed and infinite latency while you are asleep, driving, or in a meeting. A search keeps going through all of it. Willpower does not.

What to do with this on Monday morning

If you run a search anywhere, on Crawlbench or elsewhere, ask it three questions. How often does it check my cities, and where is that written down? Does every city on my search get the same schedule? Does each alert tell me why it passed and how its price compares with similar listings? Crawlbench answers all three on pricing and in every alert.

If the vendor cannot answer, assume the timing is worse than yours needs to be. And scope your search to the cities you will actually drive to, so every alert is one you can act on.

The honest close

Crawlbench's commitment is simple: checks on a schedule you can read on the pricing page, filters that keep alerts worth opening, and a team that helps you set them up. For a buyer whose edge lives in the first hours of a listing's life, sooner is better, and the plan you pick sets how soon.

To see alerts against your own filters, pricing starts with a no-card Day Pass that runs the full pipeline for 24 hours.