n8n Workflow: Find Competitor-Citing Publishers (HasData + Google Sheets)

Find competitor-citing publishers automatically—using HasData (AI Mode) + Google Sheets in n8n

This n8n Workflow: Find Competitor-Citing Publishers (HasData + Google Sheets) manually pulls Google AI Mode citation sources from HasData, scrapes the most relevant cited pages, detects competitor and brand mentions, and writes an evidence-ready review queue back to your Google Sheets.

What this workflow does

• Runs manually and loads configuration including your Google Sheets spreadsheet ID, brand aliases, competitor names, excluded domains, and sampling limits.
• Reads prompt queries from the Prompts tab, validating batch size and required headers.
• Checks existing entries in the Results tab to prevent duplicate result keys and inconsistent updates.
• Uses HasData Google SERP AI Mode to fetch citation references for each prompt, then normalizes cited URLs.
• Aggregates and prioritizes cited source URLs across prompts, excludes your own domain and other blocked domains, and selects up to the configured number of pages to scrape.
• Calls the HasData web scraping endpoint for each selected page to extract main content, titles, headings, and links.
• Searches the scraped text for brand and competitor mentions, then appends or updates rows in Google Sheets with status, prompt citations, competitor excerpts, brand evidence, and the full evidence JSON for review.

Use cases

• Competitive backlink/reputation research by identifying publishers that cite competitors in Google AI Mode.
• Content and PR teams building a review queue with on-page evidence for outreach decisions.
• SaaS operators validating whether competitor narratives or brand mentions appear in cited sources.

Technical details

• Designed for n8n automations with nodes such as if, set, code, http request, html, and `sticky note`.
• Requires the HasData community node with API credentials for both the HasData SERP (AI Mode) request and the HasData web scraping endpoint.