WordPress Missing Excerpts Generator with OpenAI (n8n)

Automatically generate missing WordPress excerpts with OpenAI—then save them back (or review first) in n8n

This n8n workflow finds published WordPress posts missing excerpts, generates plain-text excerpts using OpenAI Chat Completions in the post’s language, and optionally updates the excerpt via the WordPress REST API—safely through a configurable dry-run mode.

What this workflow does

• Runs manually or on a weekly schedule to keep your site content consistent.
• Fetches posts in edit context, then filters to keep only published posts with an empty excerpt and at least 200 characters of content.
• Limits the batch size per run to control workload and cost, strips HTML, and prepares plain-text content for prompting.
• Calls OpenAI Chat Completions to generate a JSON-formatted excerpt in the post’s language, using a configurable word limit.
• Parses and validates the AI response, skipping posts where the excerpt is missing or outside the allowed length range.
• If dryRun is enabled, outputs generated excerpts for review; otherwise, updates each post’s excerpt in WordPress via the REST API.

Use cases

• Maintain SEO-friendly search snippets by auto-filling WordPress excerpt fields for newly published content.
• Reduce editorial overhead for SaaS teams managing frequent blog publishing.
• Run a weekly “content QA” workflow to ensure every published post has a usable excerpt before indexing and sharing.

Technical details (n8n)

• Integrations: WordPress Application Password (REST API) and OpenAI API credentials in n8n.
• Workflow logic nodes mentioned: if, set, code, no op, limit, filter.
• Key configuration: site URL, posts-to-scan and per-run limits, OpenAI model, excerpt word limit, and dryRun behavior.

Setup (quick overview)

Create a WordPress Application Password with permissions to edit posts, add your WordPress and OpenAI credentials to n8n, then configure the workflow with your site URL and excerpt settings.