The Scenario
You are a link building specialist at an e-commerce company. Your outreach quota this week is 50 targeted reclamation emails. It is Monday morning. You need a list of broken backlinks pointing to your domain — referring URL, anchor text, and the broken destination URL — so you can work the list from highest to lowest authority.
The bad version of Monday morning:
- You open Ahrefs Site Explorer, filter backlinks to broken, set the target to your domain
- You export the CSV — 30 columns, most of which you do not need
- You import the CSV into Excel, delete 27 columns, rename the three you kept
- You sort by DR to prioritize high-authority sources
- You realize the export only captured the first 1,000 rows and you need to paginate and merge files
- You spend 90 minutes building the outreach list before sending a single email.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that reads the domain and pulls the broken backlinks report from Ahrefs directly, so you do not touch the export or import flow.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Fetch all broken backlinks for the domain in cell A1 from Ahrefs. Write referring URL to column A, anchor text to column B, and broken destination URL to column C. Sort by referring domain DR descending so the highest-authority opportunities appear first.
SheetXAI calls Ahrefs, writes the three columns, and sorts by source authority. The outreach list is ready.
What You Get
A prioritized broken backlink table:
- Column A — referring URL
- Column B — anchor text
- Column C — broken destination URL on your site
- Sorted — highest DR referring domains at the top
The sort is the outreach strategy. DR 80 source gets a personal email. DR 5 source gets a form submission. The list tells you where to spend your energy.
Want more? Ask SheetXAI to add a column for the source DR and a column flagging whether a redirect is already in place for each broken destination URL.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Broken backlink lists need filtering before they are outreach-ready. SheetXAI handles it in the same prompt.
When you only want broken links from domains above a DR threshold
Not every broken backlink is worth pursuing. Anything below DR 20 is probably not worth a manual outreach email.
Fetch all broken backlinks for the domain in cell A1 from Ahrefs. Filter to referring domains with DR 20 or above. Write referring URL to column A, anchor text to column B, and broken destination URL to column C. Sort by DR descending.
When some broken destination URLs already have redirects in place
Your dev team set up 301s for some broken URLs last month. You do not want to email about links that are already working.
Fetch broken backlinks for the domain in A1 from Ahrefs. For each broken destination URL in column C, check if a redirect is in place. Mark those rows "Redirect exists" in column D. Mark the rest "Needs fix." Sort column D so "Needs fix" rows appear first.
When you manage three brands and need the report for all three
You oversee three e-commerce sites and need broken backlink reports for all of them.
For each domain in cells A1, A2, and A3, fetch broken backlinks from Ahrefs and write them to three separate tabs named after each domain. In each tab, include referring URL, anchor text, broken destination URL, and source DR. Sort each tab by DR descending.
When the outreach team needs a ready-to-use contact sheet
The outreach manager wants the list pre-formatted with empty columns for contact name and email, and capped at 100 rows.
Fetch broken backlinks for the domain in A1 from Ahrefs. Filter to DR 30 or above. Write referring URL to column A, anchor text to column B, broken destination URL to column C. Add blank columns D and E labeled "Contact Name" and "Contact Email." Sort by DR descending. Stop at 100 rows.
The pattern: the broken backlink pull is one prompt. Filtering, redirect-checking, and outreach column setup extend it without switching tools.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open an Excel workbook with your domain in cell A1, then ask it to pull broken backlinks from Ahrefs. The Ahrefs integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to build a bulk domain authority audit in Excel or the Ahrefs in Excel overview.