The Scenario
You are a content marketing manager at a B2B media company. You are setting editorial linking guidelines for Q3. Before you can write them, you need to understand how aggressively the 20 top authority sites in your industry link out — their total outlink counts and how many distinct external domains they link to.
The 20 sites are in column A of your Excel workbook. You need outlink stats in columns B and C by end of the week so the editorial team can benchmark your own linking behavior against the industry standard.
The bad version of this week:
- You open Ahrefs for site 1, navigate to Outlinks, record the numbers into the workbook
- You repeat for all 20 sites
- Halfway through you realize you were looking at "linking pages" for some and "outlinks" for others — they report different numbers
- You standardize and redo eight sites
- You have 20 rows of numbers and no confidence they all came from the same metric.
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 site list and pulls outlink statistics from Ahrefs for all 20 domains in one shot.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
For each domain in column A, fetch outlinks statistics from Ahrefs including total outlinks and number of distinct external domains linked. Write total outlinks to column B and external domain count to column C. Sort the workbook by column C descending so the most aggressive linkers appear first.
SheetXAI reads all 20 domains, calls Ahrefs with the same metric for each, fills both columns, and sorts. The benchmark table is ready.
What You Get
A ranked outlink benchmark table with 20 rows:
- Column A — the domain
- Column B — total outlinks
- Column C — number of distinct external domains linked
- Sorted — highest external domain count at the top
The ratio is the signal. A site with 500 outlinks but only 10 external domains is linking heavily to a small partner set. A site with 500 outlinks to 400 different domains links broadly. That ratio tells you whether a site's linking strategy is concentrated or distributed.
Want the full list of external domains for one specific site? Ask SheetXAI to pull the linked domain list and write it to a new tab with outbound link counts sorted descending.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Outlink benchmarks need filtering and segmentation to be useful for policy decisions. SheetXAI handles them in the same prompt.
When you want to exclude news aggregators that skew the benchmark
A few of the 20 sites are aggregators that link to thousands of external domains by nature.
For each domain in column A, fetch outlink statistics from Ahrefs and write total outlinks to column B and external domains to column C. Label any site with more than 10,000 external domains as "Aggregator" in column D. Sort by column C descending.
When the editorial team wants the top 5 external domains per site
The guidelines committee wants to see which sites each authority domain links to most frequently.
After fetching outlink statistics for all domains in column A and writing to columns B and C, pull the top 5 external domains linked by each site. Write them to a new tab called "Top External Links" with the parent domain in column A and the five linked domains in columns B through F with outbound link counts adjacent.
When you want to filter to sites that link out fewer than 500 times
The guidelines apply to sites with moderate linking behavior. Very high linkers are outliers.
Fetch outlink statistics for all domains in column A. Filter to sites with fewer than 500 total outlinks. Write total outlinks to column B and external domain count to column C. Sort by column B ascending.
When the guidelines team needs a ratio column
The policy decision comes down to the outlinks-per-external-domain ratio.
Fetch outlink statistics for all 20 domains in column A from Ahrefs. Write total outlinks to column B and external domains to column C. In column D, calculate the ratio of outlinks to external domains and label it "Links per Domain." Sort by column D ascending so the most distributed linkers appear first.
The pattern: the outlink pull is one prompt. Ratios, filtering, and top-domain expansion extend the same prompt without a second Ahrefs session.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with a list of authority domains in column A, then ask it to pull outlink statistics from Ahrefs. The Ahrefs integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to build a competitive SEO matrix for 40 domains in Excel or the Ahrefs in Excel overview.