Triage YouTube comments and track video health with Apify and Google Sheets

Description

Quick overview
This workflow monitors a Google Sheets watchlist of YouTube video URLs, uses Apify’s YouTube Comments Downloader actor to fetch recent comments, and writes only high-engagement comments, question comments, and fetch failures back to Google Sheets while tracking video health and logging a per-run summary.

How it works
Runs manually (and can be switched to a schedule) to read the YouTube video watchlist from Google Sheets.
Excludes any videos marked as chronically failing, then batches the remaining video URLs into a single list.
Calls the Apify actor cleanfeed/youtube-comments-downloader to retrieve up to 100 comments per video and returns one item per comment (or per fetch failure).
Filters results so only fetch failures, comments with 10+ likes, or question-like comments (contains “?” but not “http”) continue.
Writes fetch failures and flagged comments to a Google Sheets tab using append-or-update keyed by video URL or comment ID.
Summarizes per-video fetch health from the Apify results and updates the watchlist in Google Sheets by marking videos as failing (with a timestamp) or clearing the failing status on success.
Counts flagged outcomes and health changes across the run and appends a single audit row to a Google Sheets run log.
Runs monthly to escalate videos that have been failing for 7+ days to chronically_failing and to clear that status for a one-time retry.

Setup
Install the community node @apify/n8n-nodes-apify and add your Apify OAuth2 credentials.
Add Google Sheets OAuth2 credentials and update the spreadsheet ID and sheet/tab IDs (watchlist, flagged comments, and run log) to point to your own file.
Ensure your watchlist sheet includes columns for video_url, status, and last_failed_at, and your flagged comments sheet includes columns like comment_id, video_url, author, text, like_count, reply_count, reason, and published_text.
Paste the YouTube video URLs you want to monitor into the watchlist sheet.
If you want automation, replace the manual trigger with a Schedule Trigger and adjust the monthly schedule cadence if needed.