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n8n News Monitoring With Screenshots: News Search + Website Screenshot Workflow

By AgentSearch ·

A text digest tells you what was published. Sometimes you also want to see it: the headline as it ran, a competitor's pricing page on the day it changed, the launch page before it gets edited. That's a screenshot job, and until now it meant running your own headless browser next to n8n.

Version 0.7 of the n8n-nodes-agentsearch community node adds two operations that make this a five-node workflow:

  • News Search: recent articles for any topic, each with headline, URL, snippet, source domain and publish date. $0.008 per call, not charged when there are no results.
  • Screenshot: loads a page in a real headless browser and returns a PNG or JPEG as an n8n binary, ready for Slack, email, Google Drive or an AI vision step. $0.010 per call, failed captures are not charged.

This guide builds a daily "news with screenshots" workflow, then shows a second pattern for watching any page visually. Importable JSON is below.

What you need

  • n8n (self-hosted or Cloud) with the community node installed: Settings → Community Nodes → Install → n8n-nodes-agentsearch. Self-hosted CLI: cd ~/.n8n/nodes && npm install n8n-nodes-agentsearch.
  • An AgentSearch Wallet API credential. News Search and Screenshot are paid per call over x402 in USDC on Base, straight to AgentSearch's own API at api.agentsearchhq.com. No account, no API key, no subscription.

Free Search in the same node still needs no credential at all (up to 5 results, 25 searches a day).

Step 1: add the wallet credential

  1. Create a new wallet used only for n8n and send it a little USDC on Base. A few dollars covers hundreds of calls. No ETH needed; the payment facilitator pays gas.
  2. In n8n, add an AgentSearch Wallet API credential with that wallet's private key. The credential test shows the wallet address.
  3. Leave Max Spend per Run at the default ($1.00) or lower it. Every direct call is also hard-capped at $0.020.

The node signs a payment only to AgentSearch's payee address and only after the API's 402 price terms pass those checks. The key signs locally and is never sent anywhere. Each output item carries a payment object with the settlement transaction, so you can audit every cent on Basescan.

Step 2: find today's news

Add a Schedule Trigger (for example, every day at 8:00), then an AgentSearch node:

  • Operation: News Search
  • Query: your topic, e.g. x402 payments or your company name
  • Max Results: 5 (1-10)
  • Filters → Freshness: Past Day

Other filters are there when you need them: a Date From / Date To range instead of freshness, Country (us, gb, de), Language (en, es), and Include Domains / Exclude Domains (comma-separated, up to 5 each). Include Domains is the easy way to watch only trade press or only your competitors' newsrooms.

The output is one item with a results array. Each result has title, url, content (the snippet), domain and published_date. Some sources give published_date as a relative value like "2 days ago", so treat it as display text unless you parse it.

Step 3: one item per article

Add n8n's built-in Split Out node with Field to Split Out set to results. Now each article is its own item with $json.url, $json.title and so on.

Add a Limit node (Max Items: 3) if you only want screenshots of the top few. This is the cost dial: the news call is one charge per run, and each screenshot is one more.

Step 4: screenshot each article

Add a second AgentSearch node:

  • Operation: Screenshot
  • URL: {{ $json.url }}
  • Image Format: PNG (or JPEG for smaller files)
  • Options: Viewport Width 1280 for desktop or 390 for a phone layout, Full Page on if you want the whole article (clipped at 4000 px tall)

The image lands in the binary property data (change it under Options → Binary Property). The JSON keeps the metadata: final url, page title, status_code, image width, height and bytes, plus payment. The base64 is moved out of the JSON so your execution log stays small.

From here, use whatever your team already reads:

  • Slack: upload the data binary with the title and URL as the message.
  • Gmail / Outlook: attach data to a daily digest email.
  • Google Drive / S3: save one image per article, named by date, as an archive.
  • AI vision: pass the image to a vision-capable model node and ask for a one-line summary of what the page shows.

Importable workflow JSON

Paste this onto an empty canvas or use Import from File, then pick your AgentSearch Wallet API credential on both AgentSearch nodes. IDs are illustrative; add your own Slack, email or storage node after Screenshot.

{
  "name": "Daily news with screenshots (AgentSearch)",
  "nodes": [
    {"parameters":{"rule":{"interval":[{"triggerAtHour":8}]}},"id":"c1a7d0e2-0013-4000-8000-000000000001","name":"Every morning","type":"n8n-nodes-base.scheduleTrigger","typeVersion":1.2,"position":[0,0]},
    {"parameters":{"operation":"news","query":"x402 payments","newsMaxResults":5,"filters":{"freshness":"day"}},"id":"c1a7d0e2-0013-4000-8000-000000000002","name":"News Search","type":"n8n-nodes-agentsearch.agentSearch","typeVersion":1,"position":[220,0]},
    {"parameters":{"fieldToSplitOut":"results","options":{}},"id":"c1a7d0e2-0013-4000-8000-000000000003","name":"One item per article","type":"n8n-nodes-base.splitOut","typeVersion":1,"position":[440,0]},
    {"parameters":{"maxItems":3},"id":"c1a7d0e2-0013-4000-8000-000000000004","name":"Top 3","type":"n8n-nodes-base.limit","typeVersion":1,"position":[660,0]},
    {"parameters":{"operation":"screenshot","url":"={{ $json.url }}","screenshotFormat":"png","screenshotOptions":{"width":1280}},"id":"c1a7d0e2-0013-4000-8000-000000000005","name":"Screenshot","type":"n8n-nodes-agentsearch.agentSearch","typeVersion":1,"position":[880,0],"onError":"continueRegularOutput"}
  ],
  "connections": {
    "Every morning": {"main":[[{"node":"News Search","type":"main","index":0}]]},
    "News Search": {"main":[[{"node":"One item per article","type":"main","index":0}]]},
    "One item per article": {"main":[[{"node":"Top 3","type":"main","index":0}]]},
    "Top 3": {"main":[[{"node":"Screenshot","type":"main","index":0}]]}
  },
  "settings": {"executionOrder": "v1"},
  "pinData": {}
}

Screenshot is set to continue on error, so one page that blocks headless browsers doesn't stop the other two. Failed captures are not charged.

What it costs

With the defaults above, one run is one news call plus three screenshots: $0.008 + 3 × $0.010 = $0.038. Once a day for a month is about $1.14. If a day has no news for your query, the news call is not charged, Split Out produces nothing, and no screenshots run.

Pattern 2: watch any page visually

You don't need news to use Screenshot. Replace News Search with a Code or Set node that outputs a list of URLs you care about (a competitor's pricing page, your own landing page, a status page), keep Screenshot at the end, and send the images to Slack each morning. For UI checks, run it twice with Viewport Width 1280 and 390 to see desktop and mobile side by side.

If you want text instead of pixels, use Extract Page ($0.004) on the same URLs. If a page is a JavaScript app and Extract comes back thin, Render Page loads it in a browser first; see Render and pricing.

Using News Search from an n8n AI Agent

The node is usableAsTool, so you can attach News Search to the n8n AI Agent node as a tool and let the model decide when it needs current events, next to Free Search for evergreen questions. Our earlier guide, How to Read Full Web Pages in an n8n AI Agent, shows the tool wiring with $fromAI() parameters; swap in the News Search operation the same way.

Screenshot works best as a regular workflow step, as above, because the image is binary data for the next node rather than text for the model.

Get started

  1. Install n8n-nodes-agentsearch (0.7 or later) from Settings → Community Nodes.
  2. Add an AgentSearch Wallet API credential with a small, dedicated Base wallet.
  3. Import the JSON above, change the query, and add your Slack or email step.

Full API details, including the raw POST /x402/v1/news and POST /x402/v1/screenshot endpoints for use outside n8n, are in the x402 docs. For a text-only version of this workflow, see n8n News Monitoring Workflow: Build a Free Daily Web Digest.

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Service pages: Web Search API · Web Extract API · Web Render API