n8n YouTube Weekly Digest: Apify + OpenAI + Gmail Email

Turn your YouTube watchlist into an AI-powered weekly digest—automatically

The n8n YouTube Weekly Digest: Apify + OpenAI + Gmail Email workflow runs every Monday to pull new videos from your Google Sheets list, fetch available transcripts via Apify, generate structured summaries with OpenAI, log everything to Google Sheets, and email you a single HTML digest through Gmail.

What this workflow does

• Schedules a weekly run every Monday morning.
• Reads your YouTube sources (channel, playlist, or video URLs) from the Google Sheets tab named Channels (using a Source column).
• Uses Apify to expand sources, collect recent videos, and fetch transcripts—then polls until the Apify run succeeds or fails.
• Filters intelligently: skips videos without transcripts and removes videos already summarized in previous workflow runs.
• Summarizes with OpenAI to produce structured output per new video, including key takeaways, topic tags, and a “worth-watching” verdict.
• Logs results to Google Sheets by appending video metadata and AI output to the Videos tab.
• Sends one combined HTML email to your recipient using Gmail.

Use cases

• Content monitoring: keep up with YouTube channels or playlists for your niche without manually checking transcripts.
• SaaS and product research: weekly summaries of creator updates, features, or release discussions you track.
• Team knowledge sharing: email a digest of “new + worth-watching” videos with tags and key takeaways.

Technical details

• Google Sheets: OAuth-connected spreadsheet with Channels and Videos tabs.
• Apify: HTTP requests using Authorization: Bearer <YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN> to run an actor, then poll for completion.
• OpenAI: generates structured summaries (configurable via summaryModel).
• Gmail: sends a single HTML digest email.
• n8n nodes used include: if, set, code, no op, wait, gmail.