Create research-backed articles with AI planning, Linkup Search & GPT-5

Go beyond basic AI-generated text and create articles that are well-researched, comprehensive, and credible. This template automates an advanced content creation process that mimics a professional writing team: it plans, researches, and then writes.

Instead of just giving an AI a topic, this workflow first uses an AI "planner" to break the topic down into logical sub-questions. Then, it deploys an AI "researcher" powered by Linkup to search the web for relevant insights and sources for each question. Finally, this complete, sourced research brief is handed to a powerful AI "writer" to compose a high-quality article, complete with hyperlinks back to the original sources.

Who is this for?

• Content marketers & SEO specialists: Scale the production of well-researched, link-rich articles that are built for authority and performance.
• Bloggers & thought leaders: Quickly generate high-quality first drafts on any topic, complete with a list of sources for easy fact-checking and validation.
• Marketing agencies: Dramatically improve your content turnaround time by automating the entire research and first-draft process for clients.

What problem does this solve?

• Adds credibility with sources: Solves one of the biggest challenges of AI content by automatically finding and preparing to include hyperlinks to the web sources used in the research, just as a human writer would.
• Ensures comprehensive coverage: The AI-powered "topic breakdown" step prevents superficial content by creating a logical structure for the article and ensuring all key aspects of a topic are researched.
• Improves content quality and accuracy: The "research-first" approach provides the final AI writer with a rich brief of specific, up-to-date information, leading to more detailed and factually grounded articles than a simple prompt ever could.
• Automates the entire writing workflow: This isn't just an AI writer; it's an end-to-end system that automates the planning, research, and drafting process, saving you hours of manual work.

How it works

This workflow orchestrates a multi-step "Plan, Research, Write" process:

1. Plan (Decomposition): You provide an article title and guidelines via the built-in form. An initial AI call acts as a "planner," breaking down the main topic into an array of logical sub-questions.
2. Research (Web Search): The workflow then loops through each of these sub-questions. For each one, it uses Linkup to perform a targeted web search, gathering multiple relevant insights and their source URLs.
3. Consolidate (Brief Creation): All the sourced insights from the research phase are compiled into a single, comprehensive research brief.
4. Write (Final Generation): This complete, sourced brief is handed to a final, powerful AI writer (e.g., GPT-5). Its instructions are clear: write a high-quality article based only on the provided research and integrate the source links as hyperlinks where appropriate.

Setup

1. Connect your Linkup account: In the Query Linkup for insights (HTTP Request) node, add your Linkup API key. We recommend creating a "Generic Credential" of type "Bearer Token" for this. Linkup's free plan is very generous and includes credits for ~1000 searches per month.
2. Connect your AI provider: Connect your AI provider (e.g., OpenAI) credentials to the two Language Model nodes. For cost-efficiency, we recommend a smaller, faster model for Generate research questions and a more powerful, creative model for Generate the AI output.
3. Activate the workflow: Toggle the workflow to "Active" and use the built-in form to enter an article title and guidelines to generate your first draft!

Taking it further

• Control your sources: For more brand-aligned or niche content, you can restrict the web search to specific websites by adding site:example.com OR site:anothersite.com to the query in the Query Linkup for insights node.
• Automate publishing: Connect the final Article result node to a Webflow or WordPress node to automatically create a draft post in your CMS.
• Generate content in bulk: Replace the Form Trigger with an Airtable or Google Sheet trigger to automatically generate a whole batch of articles from your content calendar.
• Customize the writing style: Tweak the system prompt in the final Generate the AI output node to match your brand's specific tone of voice, add SEO keywords, or include calls-to-action.