Extract Google Trends Keywords & Summarize Articles in Google Sheets - n8n Workflow

It's 2 PM on Tuesday. You're staring at a blank Google Doc, desperately hunting for your next big content idea. You open Google Trends, scroll through topics, click on three different articles, copy some quotes, switch back to your spreadsheet, realize you forgot to save that killer keyword, and then your browser crashes.

Welcome to the content creator's nightmare. You know that trending topic goldmine exists somewhere out there, but by the time you manually dig through it all, package it into something useful, and actually create content around it, the trend has moved on. Your audience has moved on. Your competitors have already published five articles about it.

But what if your research happened automatically while you slept? What if you woke up to a perfectly organized database of trending topics, complete with traffic numbers, source articles, and clean summaries ready to spark your next viral post?

This N8N workflow solves that exact problem by creating your personal trend-spotting assistant. Here's how it transforms your content research:

• Automatic trend detection: Monitors Google Trends every hour and captures keywords with significant traffic (500+ searches)
• Smart content aggregation: Scrapes multiple news articles for each trending topic and creates comprehensive summaries
• Organized data storage: Saves everything in Google Sheets with clean formatting, ready for your content team

Prerequisites: What You'll Need to Get Started

Before diving into the workflow creation, make sure you have these essential components ready:

Required APIs and Services

• Google Sheets API: For storing and managing your trending keywords database
• Jina AI API: For clean web scraping and content extraction (you'll need an API key)
• N8N instance: Either self-hosted or cloud version with workflow automation capabilities

Key N8N Components Used

This workflow leverages several powerful N8N nodes to create a seamless automation:

• Schedule Trigger for hourly execution
• HTTP Request nodes for Google Trends RSS feed
• XML parser for processing trend data
• Code node for filtering and data processing
• Google Sheets integration for data storage
• Split in Batches for handling multiple items
• Multiple HTTP Request nodes for content scraping

Step-by-Step Implementation Guide

Step 1: Set Up Your Workflow Foundation

Start by creating a new workflow in N8N and adding your configuration node. This acts as your control center where you define key parameters:

• Minimum traffic threshold
• Maximum results per execution
• Your Jina AI API key for content scraping

Add both a manual trigger for testing and a schedule trigger that runs every hour at 11 minutes past the hour. This timing helps avoid peak server loads while ensuring you catch trends early.

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Step 2: Connect Google Trends and Process Data

The magic starts with fetching Google Trends data. Configure an HTTP Request node to pull from Google's trending RSS feed for the US market. The workflow then processes this XML data to extract trending keywords along with their traffic estimates and associated news articles.

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Here's where it gets smart: the workflow connects to your Google Sheets database first to check what trending topics you've already captured. This prevents duplicates and keeps your data clean.

Step 3: Filter and Prioritize Trending Content

Not every trending topic deserves your attention. The Code node filters results based on your criteria, keeping only keywords that meet your minimum traffic threshold and aren't already in your database. It then sorts everything by traffic volume, ensuring you focus on the hottest trends first.

The workflow extracts up to three news articles per trending keyword, complete with titles, URLs, sources, and featured images. This gives you multiple perspectives on each trend.

Step 4: Scrape and Summarize Content

This is where Jina AI shines. For each trending keyword, the workflow scrapes content from the associated news articles. The scraping process is configured to remove ads, navigation elements, and other clutter, giving you clean, readable content.

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The workflow processes up to three articles per keyword simultaneously, then combines the content into a comprehensive summary. This parallel processing keeps everything running smoothly even with multiple trending topics.

Step 5: Quality Control and Data Storage

Before saving anything to your Google Sheets database, the workflow performs a quality check. It only saves records where content scraping was successful (summaries longer than 100 characters). This prevents incomplete or failed scraping attempts from cluttering your database.

When everything checks out, the workflow maps all the data into your Google Sheets with a clean structure: trending keyword, traffic estimates, publication dates, article titles, URLs, sources, images, and the comprehensive content summary.

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Transform Your Content Strategy with Automated Trend Research

This workflow isn't just about saving time (though you'll save hours weekly). It's about staying ahead of the content curve. Here's what becomes possible:

Content Marketing Benefits

• First-mover advantage: Spot trending topics before your competition and create content while interest is peaking
• Research depth: Get comprehensive summaries from multiple sources without manual reading
• Content calendar fuel: Build a database of trending topics with ready-made research

SEO and Traffic Opportunities

• Keyword discovery: Identify high-traffic keywords as they emerge
• Content gaps: Find topics your competitors might miss
• Trend analysis: Build historical data on trending topics in your niche

Team Collaboration

• Shared research: Your entire team can access the same trending topics database
• Status tracking: Mark topics as "idea," "in progress," or "published"
• Content briefings: Use the summaries as starting points for detailed content briefs

The beauty of this automation is that it runs quietly in the background, building your competitive advantage hour by hour. While others manually hunt for content ideas, you'll have a constantly updated database of trending topics with research already done.

Ready to never miss another trending topic? This N8N workflow transforms the tedious process of trend research into an automated content goldmine. Your future self will thank you for the head start.