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Icebreaker Generator powered with ChatGPT
This n8n template crawls a company website, distills the content with AI, and produces a short, personalized icebreaker you can drop straight into your cold emails or CRM. Perfect for SDRs, founders, and agencies who want “real research” at scale.
Good to know
Works from a Google Sheet of leads (domain + LinkedIn, etc.).
Handles common scrape failures gracefully and marks the lead’s Status as Error.
Uses ChatGPT to summarize pages and craft one concise, non-generic opener.
Output is written back to the same Google Sheet (IceBreaker, Status).
You’ll need Google credentials (for Sheets) and OpenAI credentials (for GPT).
How it works
Step 1 — Discover internal pages
Reads a lead’s website from Google Sheets.
Scrapes the home page and extracts all links.
A Code node cleans the list (removes emails/anchors/social/external domains, normalizes paths, de-duplicates) and returns unique internal URLs.
If the home page is unreachable or no links are found, the lead is marked Error and the workflow moves on.
Step 2 — Convert pages to text
Visits each collected URL and converts the response into HTML/Markdown text for analysis.
You can cap depth/amount with the Limit node.
Step 3 — Summarize & generate the icebreaker
A GPT node produces a two-paragraph abstract for each page (JSON output).
An Aggregate node merges all abstracts for the company.
Another GPT node turns the merged summary into a personalized, multi-line icebreaker (spartan tone, non-obvious details).
The result is written back to Google Sheets (IceBreaker = ..., Status = Done).
The workflow loops to the next lead.
How to use
Prepare your sheet
Include at least: organization_website_url, linkedin_url, and any other lead fields you track.
Keep an empty IceBreaker and Status column for the workflow to fill.
Connect credentials
Google Sheets: use the Google account that owns the sheet and link it in the nodes.
OpenAI: add your API key to the GPT nodes (“Summarize Website Page”, “Generate Multiline Icebreaker”).
Run the workflow
Start with the Manual Trigger (or replace with a schedule/webhook).
Adjust Limit if you want fewer/more pages per company.
Watch Status (Done/Error) and IceBreaker populate in your sheet.
Requirements
n8n instance
Google Sheets account & access to the leads sheet
OpenAI API key (for summarization + icebreaker generation)
Customizing this workflow
Tone & format: tweak the prompts (both GPT nodes) to match your brand voice and structure.
Depth: change the Limit node to scan more/less pages; add simple rules to prioritize certain paths (e.g., /about, /blog/*).
Fields: write additional outputs (e.g., Company Summary, Key Products, Recent News) back to new sheet columns.
Lead selection: filter rows by Status = "" (or custom flags) to only process untouched leads.
Error handling: expand the Error branch to retry with www./HTTP→HTTPS or to log diagnostics in a separate tab.
Tips
Keep icebreakers short, specific, and free of clichés—small, non-obvious details from the site convert best.
Start with a small batch to validate quality, then scale up.
Consider adding a rate limit if target sites throttle requests.
In short: Sheet → crawl internal pages → AI abstracts → single tailored icebreaker → write back to the sheet, then repeat for the next lead.
This automation can work great with our automation for automated cold emailing.