A weekly email that tells you every video your competitors published in the past seven days, ranked by view count, with the key topics flagged — delivered to your inbox before your Monday morning stand-up — is not a complex system. It is a workflow that runs once a week, pulls structured data from the YouTube Data API, and sends an email. Here is how it works.
What the Report Contains
The most useful weekly competitor YouTube report contains four things: the list of new videos from each monitored channel, sorted by view count; a one-line AI-generated summary of what each video covers; any topics flagged as appearing across multiple channels (indicating emerging category focus); and any topics that no competitor covered this week that represent publishing opportunities. This takes a raw data pull and turns it into something an editorial team can act on in 5 minutes.
The Workflow Architecture
A Monday morning schedule trigger fires the workflow. The first step loops through your configured competitor channel IDs and calls the YouTube Data API for each one, returning all videos from the past 7 days. The second step filters by minimum view count threshold to remove noise. The third step calls the YouTube captions API for qualifying videos and retrieves transcripts. The fourth step sends each transcript to an AI model with a prompt asking for a one-sentence summary, primary topic, and audience target. The fifth step formats all results into an HTML email and sends it to the configured recipient list.
This is exactly the architecture behind the YouTube Competitor Intelligence Monitor — the full workflow runs in n8n and takes 3 to 5 business days to configure and test. After that, the email arrives every Monday without any action from your team.
Google Sheets as a Running Archive
In addition to the weekly email, appending each week's output to a Google Sheet creates a searchable archive of everything competitors have published over time. After three months, you have enough data to see trends: which topics they return to repeatedly, how their publishing cadence changes, and when specific messaging shifts appear in their output. The email gives you the week. The sheet gives you the trend.
Cost to Run
The YouTube Data API is free within the 10,000 daily quota units — a weekly 6-channel pull uses approximately 500 units. AI analysis costs depend on the model and the length of transcripts analyzed — typically under $1 per week for a 6-channel weekly pull using GPT-4o-mini or Claude Haiku. The email sending is handled by n8n's email node or a connected SendGrid account.