n8n Webhook Triage: OpenAI Spam Scoring to Google Sheets

Stop spam form submissions and triage every lead automatically—directly into Google Sheets

This n8n Webhook Triage workflow receives website form submissions via an n8n webhook, uses OpenAI to classify and score spam, and appends results to the right Google Sheets tab for fast human review.

What this workflow does

• Receives form data (name, email, company, message) through a webhook POST request.
• Rejects invalid emails with an HTTP 400 response.
• Detects bots using a hidden honeypot field and returns a quiet HTTP 200 response without logging the submission.
• De-duplicates enquiries by checking for the same email + message within a configured time window; duplicates are acknowledged with HTTP 200 and not reprocessed.
• Classifies and scores with OpenAI: sends the enquiry plus an allowed category list to an OpenAI chat model to return JSON including category, confidence, urgency, and a short summary.
• Validates AI output and routes results:
  • Low-confidence, unknown-category, or error cases go to a human review queue.
  • Spam is handled using a stricter confidence threshold.
• Writes to Google Sheets and replies HTTP 200 on success (or HTTP 500 if the sheet write fails).

Use cases

• Automatically triage high-volume website enquiry traffic into “Enquiries”, “Review”, and “Spam”.
• Reduce workload for sales/support teams by catching bot submissions early via a honeypot.
• Ensure consistent lead categorization and urgency scoring using OpenAI before routing for action.

Technical details

• n8n nodes/logic: webhook, if, code, switch (plus a sticky note for workflow guidance).
• OpenAI integration: chat model call returning JSON classification.
• Google Sheets integration: appends to tabs named Enquiries, Review, and Spam (or updated tab names via workflow settings).

Optimize your n8n automation for lead intake—with spam scoring, de-duplication, and structured triage into Google Sheets.