YouTube Comment Triage in n8n: Apify + Google Sheets

Auto-triage YouTube comments from a Google Sheets watchlist—powered by Apify in n8n

This n8n workflow monitors a Google Sheets list of YouTube video URLs, pulls recent comments via Apify, and writes back only the most valuable signals—high-engagement comments, questions, and fetch failures—while tracking video health and producing a per-run audit log.

What this workflow does

Built for comment management and channel health monitoring, it:

• Runs manually (and can be switched to a schedule) to read a YouTube video watchlist from Google Sheets.
• Skips videos marked chronically failing, batches the remaining URLs, and prepares a single list for processing.
• Calls the Apify actor cleanfeed/youtube-comments-downloader to fetch up to 100 comments per video, returning one item per comment (or a per-fetch failure item).
• Filters results to keep only:
  • fetch failures,
  • comments with 10+ likes, and
  • question-like comments (contains “?” but not “http”).
• Appends or updates flagged outcomes in Google Sheets using an append-or-update approach keyed by video URL or comment ID.
• Summarizes per-video fetch health and updates the watchlist by marking videos as failing (with a timestamp) or clearing the failing status on success.
• Counts flagged outcomes and health changes across the run, then appends a single row to a Google Sheets run log.
• Runs monthly to escalate videos failing for 7+ days to chronically_failing, and clears that status for a one-time retry.

Use cases

• Automatically surface the most actionable YouTube comments (questions + highly liked) to your team in Google Sheets.
• Track data pipeline reliability by logging comment fetch failures per video and escalating persistent issues.
• Run scheduled YouTube comment triage for SaaS operators managing multiple channels and video watchlists.

Technical details

• n8n workflow automation using nodes such as code, merge, filter, switch, aggregate, and sticky note.
• Apify integration via the community node @apify/n8n-nodes-apify.
• Apify actor: cleanfeed/youtube-comments-downloader.
• Google Sheets read/write for the video watchlist, flagged comments/failures, and an audit run log.