n8n X Competitor Alerts: Bright Data, OpenAI, Sheets & Slack

Stay ahead of competitor announcements on X—automatically

This n8n workflow crawls selected X (Twitter) accounts every weekday morning, detects notable changes using engagement baselines, summarizes what matters with OpenAI, logs everything to Google Sheets, and sends a clear Slack digest (or a “quiet day” notice). It’s built to keep your team informed without manual monitoring.

What this workflow does

• Runs on a weekday schedule (or manually) and reads the list of X handles and thresholds from Settings.
• Prevents duplicate processing by loading previously seen post IDs from an n8n Data Table and instructing Bright Data to skip already-processed items.
• Crawls posts via Bright Data for each profile URL, then polls until the Bright Data snapshot is ready (or fails/times out).
• Scores posts vs. normal behavior: builds an engagement baseline per account (median of recent non-repost posts), tags posts (launch/pricing/funding/hiring/incident/event/general), and selects the most notable items.
• Summarizes notable announcements by sending the top items to OpenAI and producing one-sentence, plain-language summaries.
• Publishes updates by sending a Slack digest with notable items—or a “quiet day” message when nothing significant is detected.
• Documents every post by appending crawled posts (notable or not) to Google Sheets and upserting post IDs back into the n8n Data Table for the next run.
• Error handling: if the workflow errors, it posts a failure alert to a separate Slack channel.

Use cases

• Competitive intelligence for SaaS teams tracking competitor launches, pricing changes, hiring, and incidents.
• Operator-friendly monitoring that produces a daily Slack digest without switching dashboards.
• Research and outreach preparation based on summarized X announcements.

Technical details

• Bright Data (HTTP Header Auth) for X post crawling and snapshot polling.
• OpenAI for one-sentence, plain-language summaries.
• Google Sheets logging of every crawled post as rows.
• Slack digest delivery plus failure alerts to a separate channel.
• n8n logic using nodes such as if, set, code, wait, and split out.