n8n Workflow: Monitor Competitors with Firecrawl & OpenAI

Keep an eye on competitors automatically—Google Sheets in, Firecrawl + OpenAI insights out, and a PDF report emailed on schedule

This n8n workflow monitors competitor websites end-to-end: it pulls competitor URLs from Google Sheets, scrapes each site using the Firecrawl API, analyzes the content with OpenAI, logs results back to Google Sheets, generates an HTML report, converts it to a PDF via html2pdf.app, and sends the report through Gmail.

What this workflow does

• Scheduled monitoring: Runs on a schedule to keep competitive intelligence up to date.
• Reads competitor URLs from Google Sheets: Loads URLs from a specified column (e.g., a column named “Url”).
• Scrapes each competitor with Firecrawl: Iterates through competitors and retrieves site content using the Firecrawl API.
• Analyzes content with OpenAI: Sends scraped text to OpenAI to generate a structured competitive intelligence report using a defined schema.
• Updates Google Sheets + creates a report: Appends a summary row to Google Sheets and renders a styled HTML report.
• Converts HTML to PDF: Uses html2pdf.app to generate a PDF from the HTML output.
• Emails the PDF via Gmail: Attaches the PDF when available and continues to the next competitor.

Use cases

• SaaS operators tracking competitor messaging, positioning, and site changes over time.
• Automation engineers building scheduled competitive intelligence workflows with n8n.
• Teams who want a repeatable “scrape → analyze → report” pipeline without manual reporting.

Technical details

• n8n nodes / tools: set, html, gmail, sticky note, http request, google sheets
• Integrations: Google Sheets (OAuth), Firecrawl API (HTTP Bearer Auth), OpenAI (API credentials), html2pdf.app (HTTP header auth), Gmail (OAuth)
• Flow behavior: loops through competitors, scrapes with Firecrawl, analyzes with OpenAI, logs results to Google Sheets, generates HTML + PDF, and emails via Gmail.