The Scenario
You are an SEO manager at a digital agency. The pitch is Thursday at 2 PM. You need a competitive authority audit for 50 domains — DR scores and referring domain counts — built into a clean Excel workbook before the deck goes out Wednesday evening.
The 50 competitor domains are already in column A of the Competitors tab. They came from the prospect's briefing doc, a mix of direct rivals and aspirational benchmarks.
The bad version of this week:
- You open Ahrefs Site Explorer and look up domain 1
- You record the DR and referring domains manually in the workbook
- You move to domain 2
- Thirty minutes in you are on domain 8 and have lost track of which tab you exported from
- You re-check three domains because you are not sure you used the right metric
- You hand the account director a half-finished audit Wednesday night and apologize.
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 list and calls Ahrefs for every domain in one shot, without you running fifty individual lookups.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Fetch the Domain Rating and total referring domains for every domain in column A of the Competitors tab from Ahrefs. Write DR to column B and referring domains to column C. Sort the tab by column B descending so the highest-authority domains appear first.
SheetXAI reads all 50 domains, calls Ahrefs, writes both metric columns, and sorts the workbook tab. The authority audit is done.
What You Get
A ranked competitive authority table with 50 rows in the Competitors tab:
- Column A — the domain
- Column B — Domain Rating (sorted descending)
- Column C — total referring domains
The sort makes the pitch story obvious. The domains at the top are the authority benchmarks. The ones at the bottom are the reachable wins. The order explains itself.
Want to go deeper? Ask SheetXAI to add estimated organic traffic in column D, or to flag any domain with DR above 70 in column E with the label "Top Tier."
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Competitor lists from client briefing docs are rarely consistent. SheetXAI handles cleanup and the audit in the same prompt.
When domains have inconsistent formatting
Half the list has https:// prefixes, some have trailing slashes, a few are subdomains.
Normalize all domains in column A of the Competitors tab to root domain format before fetching Ahrefs data. Then write DR to column B and referring domains to column C. Sort by column B descending.
When the client wants the top 10 on a separate tab
The account director wants a summary tab with just the top 10 highest-DR competitors for the exec slide.
After fetching DR and referring domains for all domains in the Competitors tab and sorting by DR descending, copy the top 10 rows to a new tab called "Top 10 Benchmarks" with a header row.
When some domains return no Ahrefs data
A few domains are too new or too small for Ahrefs to have data on them.
Fetch DR and referring domains for all domains in the Competitors tab from Ahrefs. If no data is available for a domain, write "No data" in columns B and C instead of leaving them blank. Sort by column B descending, treating "No data" rows as lowest priority.
When the pitch also needs the top 20 backlinks per domain
The pitch team wants a Backlinks tab with source domain, anchor text, and DR for the top 20 backlinks of each competitor.
Fetch DR and referring domains for each domain in column A of the Competitors tab and write to columns B and C. Then for each domain, retrieve the top 20 backlinks including source domain, anchor text, and source DR. Write all backlinks to a new tab called Backlinks with the parent domain in column D so each set is labeled.
The pattern: instead of running fifty individual Site Explorer sessions, you give SheetXAI the full list and it handles every domain in one pass.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with a list of competitor domains, then ask it to pull DR and referring domain data from Ahrefs. The Ahrefs integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to build a full competitive SEO matrix in Excel or the Ahrefs in Excel overview.