n8n Competitor Intelligence Agent: SERP Monitoring & Summary with Thordata & OpenAI

This n8n workflow automates the process of monitoring search engine results pages (SERPs) for competitor intelligence, extracting key information, and summarizing it using AI. It's designed to help you keep track of competitor movements, new content, and market trends by regularly checking specified search queries and processing the results.

What it does

This workflow performs the following key steps:

1. Manual Trigger: The workflow is initiated manually, allowing you to control when the competitor intelligence gathering process begins.
2. Google Sheets: Although not explicitly configured in the provided JSON, this node is present, suggesting an intended integration for reading competitor search terms or writing extracted data to a Google Sheet.
3. Edit Fields (Set): This node is typically used to manipulate or define data within the workflow, such as setting variables or structuring input for subsequent nodes.
4. AI Agent: This node acts as an intelligent agent, likely orchestrating calls to various AI models and tools to achieve a specific goal, such as analyzing search results.
5. Basic LLM Chain: This node represents a fundamental chain that processes language model inputs and outputs, likely used for general text processing or instruction following.
6. OpenAI Chat Model: This node integrates with OpenAI's chat models (e.g., GPT-3.5, GPT-4) to perform natural language processing tasks like summarization, entity extraction, or content analysis on the SERP data.
7. Structured Output Parser: This node is used to parse the output from the AI models into a structured format (e.g., JSON), making it easier to consume and use in subsequent steps.
8. Information Extractor: This specialized AI chain node is designed to extract specific pieces of information (e.g., competitor names, product mentions, URLs) from unstructured text, which would be crucial for competitor intelligence.
9. Merge: This node is used to combine data from multiple branches or steps within the workflow, ensuring all relevant information is brought together for final processing or output.

Prerequisites/Requirements

To use this workflow, you will need:

• n8n Instance: A running instance of n8n.
• OpenAI API Key: For the OpenAI Chat Model node.
• Google Sheets Account: (Potentially) If the Google Sheets node is intended to be used for input or output.
• Thordata (or similar SERP API): While not explicitly present in the provided JSON, the workflow's name "SERP monitoring" strongly suggests an external service like Thordata would be used to fetch SERP data. This would likely be integrated via an HTTP Request node (not shown in the provided JSON).

Setup/Usage

1. Import the workflow: Import the provided JSON into your n8n instance.
2. Configure Credentials:
   • Set up your OpenAI API Key credential in n8n.
   • (If applicable) Configure your Google Sheets credential.
3. Review and Configure Nodes:
   • Google Sheets: If you plan to use it, configure the spreadsheet ID, sheet name, and operation (e.g., "Read" for keywords, "Write" for results).
   • Edit Fields (Set): Adjust this node to define any initial data or variables needed for your competitor analysis, such as target keywords or competitor names.
   • AI Agent, Basic LLM Chain, OpenAI Chat Model, Structured Output Parser, Information Extractor: Review the configurations of these AI-related nodes. You may need to adjust prompts, models, or output schemas based on your specific intelligence gathering needs.
   • (Missing): You will likely need to add an HTTP Request node or a dedicated SERP API node (if available) to fetch search results from a service like Thordata. This node would typically come after the trigger and before the AI processing.
4. Execute Workflow: Click the "Execute workflow" button to run the workflow manually and begin monitoring.

This workflow provides a robust framework for automating competitor intelligence by leveraging AI to process and summarize SERP data, making it easier to stay informed about your competitive landscape.