Track buyer query citation sources with GPT-4o and Google Sheets

Quick overview

This workflow tracks which sources ChatGPT cites for buyer queries.vIt runs weekly to test buyer queries against OpenAI’s GPT-4o web search, extracts the cited URLs, and logs per-query citation counts and domain classifications to Google Sheets.

How it works

1. Runs every week on a schedule trigger.
2. Reads a list of buyer queries (including brand and competitor context) from the queries tab in Google Sheets.
3. Sends each query to OpenAI’s gpt-4o-mini-search-preview three times with web search enabled and extracts the url_citation annotations from each response.
4. Aggregates citations per query and domain, calculating citation totals and a sample hit rate across the three runs.
5. Sends the unique cited domains to OpenAI’s gpt-4o-mini to classify each domain into a source taxonomy (brand site, competitor site, review platform, community, publisher, or docs/other).
6. Appends the aggregated rows with the domain classification and an example URL to the citations tab in Google Sheets.

Setup

1. Add an OpenAI API key as an HTTP Header Auth credential (Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY) for both OpenAI HTTP requests.
2. Add a Google Sheets credential with access to the target spreadsheet.
3. Create a sheet with tabs queries and citations--> queries: query_id | query | brand | competitors. citations--> run_date | query_id | query | domain | citations | sample_hit_rate | source_type | example_url
4. Replace YOUR_GOOGLE_SHEET_ID in both Google Sheets nodes and ensure the spreadsheet has queries and citations tabs with the expected columns.