Competitor News Digest — Workflow Documentation

What it does

Every morning at 08:00 IST the workflow searches Google News for each competitor, asks Gemini to score every article for relevance, summarise it in two or three lines and categorise it, drops everything that is not worth a PM's attention, and emails what is left as a single grouped digest. Every article it judged — kept or dropped — is written to Google Sheets so trends can be tracked, and the finished digest is archived on this site. On Fridays it also writes a weekly rollup.

The premise is that a PM does not have time to read news sites daily, but also cannot afford a feed that is 90% noise. Most of the engineering here went into the second problem.

The twenty nodes

What it is built from

Credentials needed to reproduce it

No keys appear in the exported workflow. To run it yourself you supply four credentials inside n8n:

Where the competitor list comes from

The scenario is a Product Manager at Zepto, tracking Blinkit, Swiggy Instamart, BigBasket and Flipkart Minutes. Indian quick commerce was chosen because it produces genuine news almost daily — funding, dark-store launches, partnerships, regulatory action — so the digest has something real to say each morning.

The list lives in the Settings node as a single comma-separated field, so there is one place to change it. The brief allows storing competitors in Google Sheets instead; that is a one-node swap, and the node carries a comment saying so. A fixed list was preferred because it makes the workflow reproducible by a reviewer without sharing a spreadsheet, and because letting the AI discover competitors on the fly introduces drift — the set would quietly change between runs and the trend history would stop being comparable.

The prompts, verbatim

Daily: score, summarise, categorise

You are a research assistant for a Product Manager at {company}, an Indian quick-commerce company.

Below are news articles about competitors. For EACH article, judge it from the PM's point of view.

Return a JSON array with one object per article, in the same order, each with:
  "relevance": 1-10. How useful is this to a {company} PM deciding what to build or worry about?
      10 = a competitor shipped a feature, raised money, entered a category or changed strategy.
      7  = a material operational or regulatory event at a competitor.
      5  = general industry or market news that sets context.
      3  = a passing mention of the competitor in a story that is really about something else.
      1  = irrelevant. Local crime, celebrity gossip, unrelated use of the brand name, pure stock
           tips, or an article not really about the competitor at all.
      Use the full range. If everything looks like a 10 you are not discriminating: reserve 9 and 10
      for news that would genuinely change what a PM does this quarter.
  "category": exactly one of ["Product Launch", "Funding", "Partnership", "Expansion", "Leadership",
      "Regulation", "Financials", "Marketing", "Other"]
  "summary": 2-3 lines, plain English, what happened and why a PM should care. No preamble, no
      repeating the headline verbatim.

Judge only what the title and snippet actually say. Do not invent details. If an article is too thin
to tell, give it a low relevance rather than guessing.

Articles:
{articles}

Reply with the JSON array only.

Friday: weekly rollup

You are briefing a Product Manager at {company} on the competitive week just gone.

Here are the competitor stories collected this week, already summarised:

{articles}

Write a short weekly rollup:
  - 3 to 5 bullets on what actually mattered, naming the competitor each time
  - one line on any pattern across the week (a category several rivals moved in, a repeated theme)
  - one line on what you would watch next week

Be concrete and brief. If the week was quiet, say so rather than padding.

Both run on gemini-2.5-flash at temperature 0.2 (0.3 for the rollup), with responseMimeType: application/json on the daily call so the reply parses reliably.

Why it is built this way

All three, implemented

Reproducing it

Download the workflow JSON — import into n8n via Workflows → Import from File, attach the four credentials, put your Sheet ID and recipient in the Settings node, and activate.

Live workflow ID KFR0wEDv4BMVEPgc. The file contains no API keys.

What is not perfect

• Gemini's category assignment is the weakest part — it has put a clear expansion story under “Other”. The summaries and relevance scores are considerably more reliable.
• On a quiet news day, regional-language articles still reach the digest because there is not enough English material to outrank them.
• Serper's free credits are a one-time grant, not a monthly allowance. At four competitors daily they last well over a year, but they do run out.
• The Friday rollup is wired and its prompt is tested, but it will not have run against a real week of data until the first Friday.