How to Automate YouTube Channel Analysis with AI-Powered Content Summaries

You know the drill. A YouTuber you follow has 200 videos. You want insights from all of them, but watching everything would take weeks. Manually summarizing? Even longer. Searching through transcripts? A nightmare.

Here's the good news: you can automate the entire process. This n8n workflow scrapes any YouTube channel, downloads video transcripts, analyzes them using AI, and organizes everything into a searchable Google Sheet. No manual labor. No burnout. Just clean, structured insights ready when you need them.

What You'll Need to Get Started

Before diving into the workflow, make sure you have these tools and accounts ready:

• n8n instance: Either cloud-hosted or self-hosted
• Apify API key: For YouTube scraping capabilities
• OpenAI API credentials: To power the AI content analysis
• Google account: Connected to both Google Drive and Google Sheets
• Gmail account: For workflow completion notifications

The workflow uses these specific n8n nodes: Form Trigger, HTTP Request, Google Sheets, Google Drive, Split In Batches, Code nodes, LangChain Agent, OpenAI Chat Model, and Wait node.

Step 1: Set Up Your Data Collection Form

The workflow starts with a Form Trigger that collects everything you need in one place. When you launch the workflow, you'll fill in the YouTube channel URL, specify how many videos to analyze, choose a storage name for your data, add your Apify API key, and provide an email address for notifications.

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This form-based approach means anyone on your team can run the workflow without touching the underlying code. The workflow then creates a dedicated Google Sheet tab with your specified name, keeping all your channel analyses organized and separate.

Step 2: Scrape YouTube Content with Precision

Once you submit the form, the workflow fires off a request to Apify's YouTube scraper. This powerful API pulls video metadata including titles, URLs, dates, likes, and descriptions. More importantly, it downloads English subtitles and transcripts for each video.

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The scraper sorts videos by newest first and respects your video count limit. All this data gets converted to a file format, uploaded to Google Drive for persistence, then downloaded back and extracted. Think of it as creating a reliable checkpoint before the heavy lifting begins.

Step 3: Process Videos One by One

Here's where the workflow gets smart. Instead of trying to process everything at once and overwhelming your APIs, it uses a Split In Batches node to handle videos sequentially. For each video, a custom JavaScript function scans through available subtitle tracks and selects the first English one it finds.

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This subtitle selection logic handles different English variants like "en", "en-US", or "en-GB" automatically. If a video has multiple English tracks, it defaults to the first one. No manual intervention needed.

Step 4: Let AI Do the Analysis

This is where things get interesting. Each video's transcript gets sent to a LangChain Agent powered by OpenAI's GPT-4.1 model. The agent acts as a specialized Video Content Summarization Specialist with a detailed system prompt that ensures consistent, high-quality output.

The AI follows strict rules: base everything on the transcript without speculation, cover all viewpoints completely, maintain logical structure, preserve technical terms, and never include timestamps. It identifies which field or domain the video belongs to, whether that's technology, education, marketing, or something else entirely.

The AI agent outputs structured JSON with three fields: VideoID, Field (the content category), and Output (the comprehensive summary). This structured format makes the data immediately useful for analysis and filtering.

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The workflow includes a two-layer validation system. First, a Structured Output Parser enforces the exact JSON schema. Then, an Auto-fix Parser catches any malformed responses and corrects them automatically. This means even if the AI occasionally goes off-script, your data stays clean.

Step 5: Organize Everything in Google Sheets

After the AI completes its analysis, a Code node extracts the VideoID, Field, and Summary from the JSON response. Another node combines this AI-generated insight with the original video metadata like title, duration, date, URL, likes, and description.

The complete dataset gets written to your Google Sheet using an append or update operation. The workflow matches records on VideoID, so if you run the same channel twice, it updates existing entries instead of creating duplicates. After each write, the workflow pauses for two seconds to avoid hitting rate limits.

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When every video has been processed, you receive an email notification with a timestamp. Your Google Sheet now contains a fully searchable database of video insights.

Why This Workflow Changes the Game

Content creators can analyze competitor channels to spot trending topics and content gaps. Researchers can extract insights from educational channels without manual transcription. Marketing teams can audit influencer content at scale before partnership decisions. Educators can build resource libraries from tutorial channels organized by topic.

The workflow handles channels with dozens or hundreds of videos equally well. Run it overnight and wake up to complete analysis. The Google Sheets output supports filtering, sorting, and pivot tables, making it easy to spot patterns across a channel's entire content library.

Beyond individual use cases, this workflow demonstrates how to build production-ready automation. It includes retry logic on critical nodes, rate limiting to respect API quotas, error handling at every step, and proper credential management. You can adapt this pattern for other content platforms like podcasts, blog archives, or course libraries.

The beauty here isn't just automation. It's intelligent automation that turns hours of manual work into minutes of setup time. Your Google Sheet becomes a knowledge base that grows automatically, and the AI summaries help you find exactly what you need without scrubbing through hours of video.

Whether you're tracking industry trends, building a competitive intelligence dashboard, or just trying to get more value from your favorite educational channels, this workflow does the heavy lifting while you focus on insights.