Create Research-Backed Articles with AI Planning, Linkup Search & GPT-5

Description

Go beyond basic AI-generated text and create articles that are well-researched, comprehensive, and credible. This template automates an advanced content creation process that mimics a professional writing team: it plans, researches, and then writes.

Instead of just giving an AI a topic, this workflow first uses an AI "planner" to break the topic down into logical sub-questions. Then, it deploys an AI "researcher" powered by Linkup to search the web for relevant insights and sources for each question. Finally, this complete, sourced research brief is handed to a powerful AI "writer" to compose a high-quality article, complete with hyperlinks back to the original sources.

Who is this for?

Content marketers & SEO specialists:** Scale the production of well-researched, link-rich articles that are built for authority and performance.
Bloggers & thought leaders:** Quickly generate high-quality first drafts on any topic, complete with a list of sources for easy fact-checking and validation.
Marketing agencies:** Dramatically improve your content turnaround time by automating the entire research and first-draft process for clients.

What problem does this solve?

Adds credibility with sources:** Solves one of the biggest challenges of AI content by automatically finding and preparing to include hyperlinks to the web sources used in the research, just as a human writer would.
Ensures comprehensive coverage:** The AI-powered "topic breakdown" step prevents superficial content by creating a logical structure for the article and ensuring all key aspects of a topic are researched.
Improves content quality and accuracy:** The "research-first" approach provides the final AI writer with a rich brief of specific, up-to-date information, leading to more detailed and factually grounded articles than a simple prompt ever could.
Automates the entire writing workflow:** This isn't just an AI writer; it's an end-to-end system that automates the planning, research, and drafting process, saving you hours of manual work.

How it works

This workflow orchestrates a multi-step "Plan, Research, Write" process:

Plan (Decomposition): You provide an article title and guidelines via the built-in form. An initial AI call acts as a "planner," breaking down the main topic into an array of logical sub-questions.
Research (Web Search): The workflow then loops through each of these sub-questions. For each one, it uses Linkup to perform a targeted web search, gathering multiple relevant insights and their source URLs.
Consolidate (Brief Creation): All the sourced insights from the research phase are compiled into a single, comprehensive research brief.
Write (Final Generation): This complete, sourced brief is handed to a final, powerful AI writer (e.g., GPT-5). Its instructions are clear: write a high-quality article based only on the provided research and integrate the source links as hyperlinks where appropriate.

Setup

Connect your Linkup account: In the Query Linkup for insights (HTTP Request) node, add your Linkup API key. We recommend creating a "Generic Credential" of type "Bearer Token" for this. Linkup's free plan is very generous and includes credits for ~1000 searches per month.
Connect your AI provider: Connect your AI provider (e.g., OpenAI) credentials to the two Language Model nodes. For cost-efficiency, we recommend a smaller, faster model for Generate research questions and a more powerful, creative model for Generate the AI output.
Activate the workflow: Toggle the workflow to "Active" and use the built-in form to enter an article title and guidelines to generate your first draft!

Taking it further

Control your sources:* For more brand-aligned or niche content, you can restrict the web search to specific websites by adding site:example.com OR site:anothersite.com to the query in the *Query Linkup for insights** node.
Automate publishing:* Connect the final *Article result* node to a *Webflow* or *WordPress** node to automatically create a draft post in your CMS.
Generate content in bulk:* Replace the *Form Trigger* with an *Airtable* or *Google Sheet** trigger to automatically generate a whole batch of articles from your content calendar.
Customize the writing style:* Tweak the system prompt in the final *Generate the AI output** node to match your brand's specific tone of voice, add SEO keywords, or include calls-to-action.