Track trending topics and generate content briefs with Claude

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Newsletter editors and YouTube channel managers burn hours every week hunting for what their audience actually wants to read next. This AI automation pulls live trend data, gathers supporting news coverage, and delivers ready-to-assign content angle suggestions into a Google Sheet automatically.

What This Automation Does

Scans Google Trends data to surface the fastest-growing search topics inside a client's niche, filtering out geo-localized noise for a global view
Searches Google News for recent articles tied to each emerging trend and scrapes the full article content for deeper context
Feeds the scraped articles and trend signals into Claude to generate specific, opinionated content angle suggestions a writer can act on immediately
Writes all ranked topics and AI-drafted briefs into a structured Google Sheet the client can share directly with their editorial team

Tools Used

Claude
Google Sheets
Firecrawl
n8n

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How To Build It

Configure topic inputs and scheduling

The automation is set to run on a recurring schedule, pulling a client-defined list of seed topics from Google Sheets so new trend cycles kick off without any manual trigger.

Pull and rank trending search queries

SerpAPI queries Google Trends for searches related to each seed topic, returning growth-rate data that the workflow scores and sorts to surface only the topics with the strongest recent momentum.

Collect live news articles per trend

For each top-ranked trend, SerpAPI queries Google News to find current articles, then Firecrawl retrieves the full text of each article so Claude receives substance rather than headlines alone.

Generate content angles with Claude

The full article text and trend growth data are passed to Claude with a structured output prompt, producing a specific content angle, a suggested hook, and a target audience note for each trending topic.

Write ranked briefs into Google Sheets

All Claude-generated content angles, ranked by trend strength, are appended as clean rows into the client's Google Sheet, producing a finished trend intelligence report ready to hand off each cycle.

Pitfalls

SerpAPI enforces monthly search credit limits, and workflows that run too frequently or scan too many seed topics will exhaust a client's quota mid-month, causing silent data gaps in their report.
Firecrawl occasionally fails to scrape paywalled or JavaScript-heavy news sites, which means some trend rows in the Sheet will arrive with incomplete context and Claude will produce weaker content angles for those entries.
Claude's output format can drift between runs if the structured output prompt is not locked down with explicit field definitions, resulting in inconsistently shaped rows that break the Google Sheets append logic.

FAQ

Can I build this without coding?

Almost entirely. The workflow uses a small code block to score and sort trend data, but it is straightforward JavaScript that can be copied from examples or adjusted with Claude's help. No software engineering background is required.

How long does it take?

A focused build session runs roughly four to six hours end to end, including connecting all API keys and testing the Sheet output format. Expect another hour or two to customise the Claude prompt for a specific client niche.

What can I charge?

This workflow is well suited to a recurring monthly deliverable, where you run it on behalf of a client and deliver a branded Google Sheet report each week or month. Packaging it as a managed service rather than a one-time build tends to produce steadier income.

Which tool is required vs optional?

SerpAPI is required for both the trend data and the news search, and Claude is required for the content angle generation. Firecrawl is technically optional since you could pass only headlines to Claude, but the output quality drops noticeably without full article text.

This is original DigiNo analysis. The underlying automation pattern is a community workflow template – view the original on n8n.