How to Scrape and Summarize Web Pages with AI Automation

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How to Scrape and Summarize Web Pages with AI Automation

Manually reading and summarizing web content for research is time-consuming and tedious. Fortunately, there’s a powerful automation solution that can handle this process automatically, delivering summarized content directly to your Google Sheets without any manual intervention.

This automation connects Google Sheets, FireCrawl, and OpenAI to create a seamless workflow that scrapes web content and generates AI summaries instantly. The best part is that you don’t need any programming knowledge to set it up.

The Automation Process

The workflow is simple but powerful:

  1. You enter a title and URL in your Google Sheet
  2. FireCrawl automatically scrapes the web page content
  3. OpenAI processes and summarizes the content
  4. The summary gets automatically added back to your Google Sheet

Setting Up the Automation

Step 1: Create a Workflow in Public Connect

Start by accessing Public Connect’s dashboard and creating a new workflow. Name it appropriately and save it to your preferred folder.

Step 2: Set Up the Trigger

Select Google Sheets as your trigger application and choose “new or updated spreadsheet row” as the trigger event. Copy the WebURL provided.

Step 3: Connect Google Sheets

In your Google Sheet, go to Extensions → Add-ons → Get add-ons and install the Public Connect WebHooks extension. After refreshing your spreadsheet, go to Extensions → Public Connect WebHooks → Initial Setup. Paste the WebURL and specify your trigger column (the column that, when updated, will trigger the workflow).

Step 4: Configure FireCrawl for Web Scraping

Add FireCrawl as your first action step and select “Add a scrape” as the action event. Connect your FireCrawl account by adding your API key, which you can find in your FireCrawl dashboard under API Keys. Map the URL from your Google Sheet to tell FireCrawl which page to scrape. Set the format to markdown.

Step 5: Set Up OpenAI for Summarization

Add OpenAI as your next action step and select “Chat” as the action event. Connect your OpenAI account using your API key. Select GPT-4 (or another model of your choice) and create a prompt that instructs the AI to summarize the content. Map the scraped content from FireCrawl into your prompt.

Step 6: Update Google Sheets with the Summary

Add Google Sheets as your final action step and select “Update a cell value” as the action event. Select your spreadsheet and sheet, then specify the range where you want the summary to appear. Map the row index to ensure the summary goes in the correct row, and map the OpenAI-generated summary as the value to be inserted.

Benefits of This Automation

This workflow offers several advantages for researchers, content creators, and business analysts:

  • Saves hours of manual reading and summarizing
  • Provides consistent summary quality through AI
  • Processes information in real-time
  • Scales easily to handle multiple web pages
  • Requires no coding knowledge

Once set up, you can simply enter URLs into your spreadsheet and watch as summaries automatically appear—freeing you to focus on analyzing insights rather than collecting them.

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