YouTube Competitor Content Ideas: n8n + Gemini + Sheets

Turn Competitor YouTube Uploads into Fresh Video Ideas Automatically (n8n + Gemini + Google Sheets)

This n8n workflow automatically scans competitor YouTube channels via RSS, uses Google Gemini to generate and score new content ideas, logs results to Google Sheets, and sends you a Gmail digest—so you always have timely, differentiated ideas without manual research.

What this workflow does

• Runs weekly (or triggers on a form submission) to process competitors.
• Accepts a comma-separated list of YouTube channel IDs from the form input (when triggered manually).
• Reads previously processed video IDs from the Google Sheets tab “Seen Videos” to avoid repeats across runs.
• Fetches each competitor’s YouTube RSS feed, parses recent uploads, and merges them into a single candidate list.
• Filters out videos already marked as seen, optionally adds a forced test candidate, and exits early if there are no new videos.
• For each new competitor video, sends the title and metadata to Google Gemini to produce three differentiated idea titles plus an opportunity score and supporting fields.
• Saves only ideas that meet the score threshold to the Google Sheets tab “Video Ideas”.
• Appends every processed video to “Seen Videos” and, if at least one idea was saved, emails a plain-text digest via Gmail.

Use cases

• SaaS teams tracking competitor launches to plan next-week YouTube content.
• Automation engineers building a repeatable YouTube competitor content ideas pipeline using n8n.
• Creators who want consistent ideation based on actual competitor uploads—without duplicate coverage.

Technical details

• Google Sheets OAuth2 for reading/writing “Seen Videos” and “Video Ideas”.
• Gmail OAuth2 for sending the digest email.
• Google Gemini (PaLM) API for generating and scoring content ideas.
• n8n nodes referenced in the workflow: if, set, code, no op, gmail, sticky note.

To set up: add the required credentials, create (or configure) the “Seen Videos” and “Video Ideas” tabs, and paste your Google Sheet ID.