Extract Named Entities from Web Pages with Google Natural Language API

Description

Who is this for?

Content strategists analyzing web page semantic content
SEO professionals conducting entity-based analysis
Data analysts extracting structured data from web pages
Marketers researching competitor content strategies
Researchers organizing and categorizing web content
Anyone needing to automatically extract entities from web pages

What problem is this workflow solving?
Manually identifying and categorizing entities (people, organizations, locations, etc.) on web pages is time-consuming and error-prone. This workflow solves this challenge by:

Automating the extraction of named entities from any web page
Leveraging Google's powerful Natural Language API for accurate entity recognition
Processing web pages through a simple webhook interface
Providing structured entity data that can be used for analysis or further processing
Eliminating hours of manual content analysis and categorization

What this workflow does
This workflow creates an automated pipeline between a webhook and Google's Natural Language API to:

Receive a URL through a webhook endpoint
Fetch the HTML content from the specified URL
Clean and prepare the HTML for processing
Submit the HTML to Google's Natural Language API for entity analysis
Return the structured entity data through the webhook response
Extract entities including people, organizations, locations, and more with their salience scores

Setup
Prerequisites:
An n8n instance (cloud or self-hosted)
Google Cloud Platform account with Natural Language API enabled
Google API key with access to the Natural Language API

Google Cloud Setup:

Create a project in Google Cloud Platform
Enable the Natural Language API for your project
Create an API key with access to the Natural Language API
Copy your API key for use in the workflow

n8n Setup:

Import the workflow JSON into your n8n instance
Replace "YOUR-GOOGLE-API-KEY" in the "Google Entities" node with your actual API key
Activate the workflow to enable the webhook endpoint
Copy the webhook URL from the "Webhook" node for later use

Testing:

Use a tool like Postman or cURL to send a POST request to your webhook URL
Include a JSON body with the URL you want to analyze: {"url": "https://example.com"}
Verify that you receive a response containing the entity analysis data

How to customize this workflow to your needs
Analyzing Specific Entity

Modify the "Google Entities" node parameters to include entityType filters
Add a "Function" node after "Google Entities" to filter specific entity types
Create conditions to extract only entities of interest (people, organizations, etc.)

Processing Multiple URLs in Batch:

Replace the webhook with a different trigger (HTTP Request, Google Sheets, etc.)
Add a "Split In Batches" node to process multiple URLs
Use a "Merge" node to combine results before sending the response

Enhancing Entity Data:

Add additional API calls to enrich extracted entities with more information
Implement sentiment analysis alongside entity extraction
Create a data transformation node to format entities by type or relevance

Additional Notes

This workflow respects Google's API rate limits by processing one URL at a time
The Natural Language API may not identify all entities on a page, particularly for highly technical content
HTML content is trimmed to 100,000 characters if longer to avoid API limitations
Consider legal and privacy implications when analyzing and storing entity data from web pages
You may want to adjust the HTML cleaning process for specific website structures

❤️ Hueston SEO Team