How to Build an Automated Website Email Scraper Using N8N for Free

In today’s digital marketing landscape, having access to potential leads’ contact information is invaluable. This automated workflow allows you to scrape emails, social media links, or competitor data from any website without cost, giving you the ability to expand your outreach or monitor industry competitors with minimal effort.

How the Automated Scraper Works

The workflow operates through a simple click trigger that activates a bot to run through a Google spreadsheet containing website URLs. The system then automatically visits each website, extracts the desired information, and neatly organizes it into your Google Sheet for later processing.

During testing, the scraper processed approximately 10 results in just one minute. While not every website yielded an email address (as not all businesses make this information readily available), the tool successfully extracted all discoverable email contacts.

Setting Up Your N8N Email Scraper

The setup process begins with a click trigger that runs off your spreadsheet data. If you don’t already have website data to scrape, consider using the Google Maps scraper workflow first to populate your sheet with business information including names, addresses, websites, and phone numbers.

The workflow follows these steps:

1. Pulls information from your Google Sheet
2. Filters out entries without websites (as there would be nothing to scrape)
3. Checks if emails already exist to avoid redundant processing
4. Loops through each remaining business entry
5. Uses Jina.ai service to scrape the website content
6. Processes the content through an AI node to extract emails
7. Updates your Google Sheet with the extracted email addresses

The AI Component

The workflow uses an AI agent configured to identify the most relevant business contact email from each website. It’s designed to prioritize high-authority contacts over generic addresses like “info@” when possible, though it will capture whatever is available.

The system uses a minimal AI model (40 mini, though 4.1 mini or 4.1 nano is recommended) since the task requires simple extraction rather than complex reasoning, keeping your costs minimal.

Important Considerations

This scraper doesn’t crawl entire site maps or visit every page on a website, which helps avoid rate limiting issues. It’s recommended to use this tool conservatively by processing 100-200 websites at a time rather than attempting thousands in a single run, which could potentially result in service restrictions.

Beyond Email Scraping

While this workflow is configured for email extraction, it can be easily modified to pull social media links or other valuable information from target websites. When combined with a Google Maps scraper, you can quickly build comprehensive marketing lists for your outreach campaigns or competitor analysis reports.

This automation tool represents a significant time-saver for marketing professionals and business owners looking to expand their reach efficiently and effectively.