The Scenario
You are an agency account manager. The client call is Friday at 11 AM. Your client wants to see how their Domain Rating has grown over 12 months compared to two competitors. They believe the link building campaign you ran this year moved the needle — they want a chart to prove it.
Three domains. Twelve months of DR history per domain. That is 36 data points you need in an Excel workbook before you can build the chart.
The bad version of Thursday:
- You open Ahrefs for domain 1, navigate to DR history, manually record each month's value into the workbook
- You repeat for domains 2 and 3
- You try to align the three sets of monthly data because each Ahrefs export had different date formatting
- You build the chart, realize the axes are wrong, rebuild it
- You walk into Friday's call with a chart that the client immediately asks to explain — because the axis labels are in a format you did not clean up.
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 fetches DR history from Ahrefs for all three domains at once, with dates aligned in the same columns.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Fetch 12 months of Domain Rating history for each domain in column A from Ahrefs. Put the month labels in column A starting at row 2, and put each domain's monthly DR values in columns B, C, and D with the domain name as the column header. Then create a line chart on a new tab called "DR Trend" showing all three domains' DR over the 12-month period.
SheetXAI fetches 36 data points, aligns them by month, builds the chart on a new tab, and writes it to the workbook. The client presentation is ready.
What You Get
A DR trend comparison with 12 rows of data and a chart tab:
- Column A — month labels
- Column B — client domain DR per month
- Column C — competitor 1 DR per month
- Column D — competitor 2 DR per month
- "DR Trend" tab — line chart comparing all three domains over 12 months
The chart tells the story without narration. If your link building campaign moved the client's DR while competitors stayed flat, the lines say it better than any slide copy.
Want 24 months instead of 12? Change the number. Want to annotate the chart with the campaign start date? Add that instruction.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Historical DR comparisons need context layers to make the story land. SheetXAI handles them in the same prompt.
When the domains in column A have inconsistent formatting
Some domains have https://, some are bare, some have trailing slashes.
Normalize all domains in column A to root domain format before fetching DR history from Ahrefs. Then pull 12 months of DR per domain, align by month in columns B through D, and create a line chart on the "DR Trend" tab.
When the client wants quarter-over-quarter checkpoints highlighted
Month-by-month is useful but the client wants the four quarterly end-points called out.
After fetching 12 months of DR history for all three domains and writing to columns A through D, add a row below the data showing Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4 end-of-quarter DR values for each domain. Label those rows clearly.
When the chart needs a 24-month window
The client started the link building campaign 18 months ago and wants the full before-and-after view.
Fetch 24 months of Domain Rating history for each domain in column A from Ahrefs. Write monthly DR values to columns B, C, D with months in column A. Create a line chart on the "DR Trend" tab showing the full 24-month trend.
When the client also wants referring domain history to corroborate the DR trend
DR is a lagging indicator. Referring domains are the leading signal. The client wants both to tell the full story.
Fetch 12 months of DR history for each domain in column A and write to columns B, C, D. Then fetch 12 months of referring domains history for each domain and write monthly counts to columns E, F, G with the same month alignment. Create two line charts on the "DR Trend" tab: one for DR and one for referring domains.
The pattern: the DR history pull is one prompt. Extending the window, adding referring domains, and labeling quarterly checkpoints extend the same prompt without a new Ahrefs session.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with a domain list in column A, then ask it to pull 12 months of DR history from Ahrefs and chart the trends. The Ahrefs integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to analyze 24 months of referring domains history in Excel or the Ahrefs in Excel overview.