n8n Zen Content Automation: OpenRouter Articles & Images to Google Sheets/Drive

Automate a complete Yandex Zen content pipeline—topics, AI-written articles, and illustrations—then save everything to Google Sheets & Drive

This n8n workflow generates weekly Russian article topics from Wikipedia categories, drafts a daily article and up to two images via OpenRouter, and publishes your outputs into Google Docs/Drive while tracking status in a Google Sheets database. Designed for n8n users and automation engineers who want a reliable, production-style content workflow.

What this workflow does

• Scheduled topic refresh (weekly) or manual run (daily): Runs on demand for daily generation, and on Mondays at 09:00 to refresh the topic queue.
• Creates/loads your content database in Google Drive: Searches for a Google Sheets file named Zen_Content_DB. If missing, it creates it with sheets for Topics, Published, Images, and State, plus a Zen_Content_Articles folder.
• Generates new topic ideas: Reads existing published/queued titles from the Topics sheet, pulls a random women-focused Wikipedia category, uses OpenRouter (Claude Sonnet) to create unique Russian topic ideas, and appends only non-duplicates.
• Drafts daily articles from queued topics: Selects one topic where status = new, generates a Russian article with OpenRouter (Claude Haiku), then rewrites it in a second pass to reduce AI-sounding patterns.
• Saves and shares content: Creates a per-article folder in Google Drive, creates a Google Doc, inserts the final article text, and shares the document link publicly.
• Generates and uploads illustrations: Uses OpenRouter (GPT-5) to extract up to two illustrated scenes and produce English image prompts, then calls OpenRouter Images (Gemini image model) to generate images and uploads them to Google Drive.

Use cases

• Run a consistent Yandex Zen publishing cadence without manually planning every topic and draft.
• Centralize editorial workflow data in Google Sheets while storing articles and images in Google Drive.
• Use OpenRouter models for both text drafting and image prompt generation in one automated pipeline.

Technical details

• n8n workflow logic: if, set, code, wait, limit, merge.
• External services: Wikipedia API, OpenRouter (Claude Sonnet, Claude Haiku, GPT-5), OpenRouter Images (Gemini), Google Sheets, Google Drive, Google Docs.
• Data flow: Topic queue management (Topics/Published/State) + per-article Drive folders + public Doc links.