Weekly Research Brief PDF Automation in n8n (Brave, Firecrawl, Claude)

Automate your weekly research brief in n8n—Brave search, Firecrawl scraping, Claude writing, and a ready-to-email PDF

This n8n workflow automatically gathers web research on your chosen topics every Monday, scrapes the top results, and generates a cited weekly research brief PDF using Anthropic Claude. It formats the brief as HTML, converts it to PDF via PDF.co, emails it through Gmail, and archives it to Google Drive.

What this workflow does

• Runs weekly on a Monday 07:00 schedule and loads your brief settings (topics, result limits, branding, and delivery targets).
• Searches topics with Brave Search using a past-week freshness filter, splitting your comma-separated topic list and querying each topic.
• Selects valid results up to your configured limit, assigns source IDs, and carries topic metadata forward.
• Scrapes pages with Firecrawl for each result URL, cleans and truncates extracted Markdown, and falls back to the search snippet when page text is missing.
• Writes a structured brief with Claude from the aggregated sources, producing a JSON brief with:
  • a two-sentence summary,
  • topic findings,
  • citations by source ID,
  • watch items.
• Generates a branded HTML brief, converts it to a PDF via PDF.co, downloads the file, then emails it via Gmail and uploads it to Google Drive.

Use cases

• Weekly competitor or market monitoring reports with citations for SaaS teams.
• Research briefs for product, growth, or engineering updates—automatically refreshed every week.
• Ops-ready documentation: archive every generated PDF to Google Drive for quick retrieval.

Technical details

• Integrations/steps: Brave Search, Firecrawl, Anthropic Claude, PDF.co, Gmail, Google Drive.
• n8n workflow building blocks include nodes like Set, Code, Split, Aggregate, and workflow notes for clarity.
• Requires credentials for Brave Search, Firecrawl, Claude, PDF.co (or n8n AI Gateway credits), plus Gmail and Google Drive access for delivery and archiving.