AI SEO Content Brief Generator — From Keyword to Publication-Ready Brief in 3 Minutes
Built by VaporGrid ·
About this build
A Claude powered workflow that takes a target keyword, researches the top ranking pages, identifies content gaps, and generates a detailed SEO content brief including structure, word count, headings, internal link suggestions, semantic keywords and tone guidance — ready to hand to a writer or use yourself.
What was built
I built this after realising I was spending more time briefing writers than actually reviewing their work. The research phase alone was eating 2 hours per article and most of it was the same process every time — check the top 10 results, identify what they cover, find the gaps, decide on structure. Completely automatable. Here is exactly how the workflow runs: Step 1 — SERP Research via Perplexity The workflow takes a target keyword and sends it to Perplexity with a structured prompt that pulls back what the top ranking pages are actually covering. Not just titles — the actual subtopics, questions answered, and angles taken. This gives a real picture of what Google considers comprehensive coverage for that keyword. Step 2 — Gap Analysis via Claude The Perplexity output gets passed to Claude with a prompt that identifies three things. What are all the top pages covering that the user's site is not. What questions are people asking about this topic that none of the top pages answer well. What angle or perspective is completely missing from the current top results that could be a genuine differentiator. Step 3 — Brief Generation via Claude Claude then generates a complete content brief structured exactly like this — target keyword and semantic variations to include naturally, recommended word count based on competitor length, H1 suggestion, H2 and H3 structure with brief notes on what each section should cover, three to five internal link opportunities based on related topics, readability and tone guidance, meta title and meta description suggestions, and a one paragraph editor note explaining the strategic angle and why this piece could outrank the current top results. Step 4 — Output to Google Sheets The completed brief gets written to a Google Sheet row automatically. Each row includes the keyword, the brief, a competitor summary, and a timestamp. This means every brief is archived and searchable, which becomes genuinely useful when you have produced 50 plus of them and want to check if a topic has already been covered. What took the longest to get right: The gap analysis prompt. The first version just listed everything the competitors covered without any prioritisation. The output was overwhelming and not actually useful. The final version explicitly asks Claude to rank the gaps by search intent match and by how feasible they are to cover better than the existing results. That ranking step is what makes the output actionable rather than just comprehensive. Real results: Using this workflow on a content site for 6 weeks. Average time from keyword to brief went from about 2 hours manually to under 4 minutes. The briefs are also more consistent — writers report needing fewer revisions because the structure and angle is clearer upfront. Three articles produced using these briefs have reached page 1 within 8 weeks of publishing which is ahead of the site's previous average. What I would add next: A competitor backlink pull so the brief also includes a list of sites already linking to the top results — which gives the writer context for outreach opportunities after the article publishes. Also want to add a People Also Ask scrape to pull question-based H2 suggestions directly from Google rather than inferring them from Perplexity output. Happy to share the full n8n workflow JSON and Claude prompt structure in the comments if anyone wants to run it themselves.