Automate Competitor SERP Monitoring With n8n and Claude

If you're SEO-active, you should know within 24 hours when a competitor takes a position you owned. Most teams find out three weeks later when traffic dips. This workflow closes that gap to one morning Slack message.

What you'll build

Cron (daily 6am)
  → Pull keyword list from Google Sheet
  → Scrape SERP for each keyword
  → Compare to yesterday's snapshot
  → If position changed, summarize with Claude
  → Post digest to Slack

Prerequisites

• n8n (self-hosted on a $5 VPS or n8n Cloud)
• A SERP API (SerpApi, ValueSerp, or DataForSEO — about $30/month for 500 daily queries)
• Claude API key
• Slack workspace + incoming webhook

Step 1: Keyword input (5 min)

Create a Google Sheet:

| Keyword | Your URL | Country | |:--------|:---------|:--------| | ai marketing automation | nvm.marketing/automation | UAE | | ... | ... | ... |

Connect n8n's Google Sheets node and read this on each run. Why a sheet: anyone on the team can add/remove keywords without touching n8n.

Step 2: SERP scrape per keyword (10 min)

Loop node → SERP API HTTP request → store top 10 results per keyword in a temp store (Redis, Postgres, or even a JSON file on disk).

Schema for each result:

{
  "keyword": "ai marketing automation",
  "date": "2026-05-26",
  "position": 1,
  "url": "competitor.com/page",
  "title": "..."
}

Step 3: Diff against yesterday (10 min)

Query yesterday's snapshot. For each keyword:

• Who entered the top 3 that wasn't there yesterday?
• Who fell out of the top 10?
• Did our URL move? Up or down?
• What new title appears for the #1 position?

Drop unchanged keywords entirely. Only changes get to step 4.

Step 4: Claude summarizes (10 min)

Send the diff to Claude with this prompt:

You're an SEO analyst. Given this overnight SERP change report, write a
Slack-ready digest. Constraints:
- Lead with the highest-impact change (we moved, or a new competitor entered)
- One-line per change
- Group by keyword theme if there are many
- Tag any change that needs my attention TODAY with 🚨
- Tag interesting-but-not-urgent with 📌
- Skip anything that's just noise

Diff:
[paste]

Step 5: Post to Slack (5 min)

Slack node, posts to #seo-watch channel at 6:30am. Done.

What I'd add later

• A weekly version that summarizes patterns across 7 days (trend signal, not single-day noise)
• A "competitor profile" version that pulls just one rival's full SERP footprint every Monday
• An auto-create task in Linear/Asana when a 🚨 change appears

Build the base first. Add the extensions only when you've used the base for two weeks and know what you're missing.