Turn YouTube comments into content ideas with GPT-4.1-mini, Tavily & Apify

Description

This n8n template demonstrates how to turn raw YouTube comments into research-backed content ideas complete with hooks and outlines.

Use cases include:

• Quickly mining a competitor’s audience for video ideas.
• Generating hooks and outlines for your own channel’s comments.
• Validating content opportunities with live audience feedback.

Good to know

• Apify is used to scrape YouTube comments (requires an API token).
• GPT-4.1-mini is used for both filtering and content generation.
• Tavily provides fresh research to ground the AI’s responses.
• All outputs are stored in Google Sheets, making it easy to manage and track ideas.

How it works

1. Trigger – Paste a YouTube URL into the chat trigger.
2. Scrape Comments – Apify fetches all comments and metadata.
3. Filter – GPT-4.1-mini decides if each comment could inspire a content idea.
4. Store – Comments and “Yes/No” decisions are appended to Google Sheets.
5. Research & Enrich – For “Yes” comments, Tavily provides context, and GPT generates a topic, hook, and outline.
6. Update Sheet – The same row in Google Sheets is updated with enriched fields.

Google Sheets Setup

Your Google Sheet should include these columns (in this order):

id | text | author | likes | isIdea | topic | research | hook | outline

• id – unique identifier for each comment
• text – the full YouTube comment
• author – commenter’s name/handle
• likes – number of likes on the comment
• isIdea – “Yes” or “No” depending on GPT filter
• topic – extracted video topic
• research – 300–500 word background from Tavily
• hook – engaging opening sentence for a video
• outline – structured video outline

Setup Steps

• Connect your Apify, OpenAI, Tavily, and Google Sheets credentials in n8n.
• Point the Google Sheets nodes to your own document and ensure the above headers exist.
• Replace sample API keys with your own stored in n8n Credentials.

Time to set up: ~15–25 minutes for a first-time n8n user (less if you already have credentials handy).

Customizing this workflow

• Filter logic – Loosen the GPT filter to allow borderline ideas, or tighten it to only accept the best ones.
• Research depth – Change Tavily’s search depth (e.g., depth: basic vs depth: advanced) to control how detailed the background research is.
• Notification channels – Send new “Yes” ideas directly to Slack (#content-ideas), Notion (your content board), or Email (notify the content manager instantly).
• Alternative outputs – Instead of hooks/outlines, generate:
  • A script draft for YouTube Shorts.
  • Blog post angles based on the same audience comments.
  • A poll question for community engagement.