Find Link Gap Prospects with DataForSEO + OpenAI in n8n

Find “link gap” backlink prospects automatically using DataForSEO + OpenAI in n8n

This n8n workflow pinpoints websites that link to your competitors but not to you, estimates their potential traffic with DataForSEO, and uses OpenAI to craft a focused one-sentence outreach angle—then saves everything to your Google Sheets prospects tab.

What this workflow does

• Receives inputs from a form submission: your domain, competitor domains, ranking/threshold parameters, and your Google Sheets tracker URL.
• Uses DataForSEO Backlinks Domain Intersection to find referring domains that link to all competitors while excluding domains that already link to your site.
• Pulls your top existing pages via DataForSEO Labs Relevant Pages (based on estimated organic traffic) to constrain what can be pitched.
• If no prospects remain after filtering, returns a “no new prospects” message on the completion page.
• Estimates each shortlisted domain’s traffic potential using DataForSEO Labs Bulk Traffic Estimation, then calculates a score using domain rank, estimated visits, and spam score.
• Sends the best prospects plus your best pages to OpenAI to select a valid pitch page and generate one outreach angle per domain.
• Appends results (one row per prospect) to the prospects tab in Google Sheets and displays an HTML shortlist summary back on the form completion page.

Use cases

• SEO teams generating link-building targets for SaaS and B2B sites using link gap research.
• Automation engineers building an end-to-end prospecting pipeline in n8n with DataForSEO + OpenAI.
• Operators validating outreach lists by prioritizing prospects with traffic and spam scoring.

Technical details

• Integrations/Credentials: DataForSEO (Basic Auth: username = account email, password = API password) and OpenAI.
• n8n nodes used: form, form trigger, if, code, merge, sticky note.