The Scenario
You are an SEO auditor. You are presenting to a client next Tuesday who wants to know whether a Google algorithm update 14 months ago caused a drop in their referring domain count — and whether they have recovered.
Three domains: the client's and two competitors. You need 24 months of referring domain history per domain in an Excel workbook, the biggest single-month drops flagged, and the data ready to build a narrative around the update timing.
The bad version of this week:
- You open Ahrefs for the client domain, navigate to Referring Domains history, manually record each month
- You repeat for competitors 1 and 2
- You try to align three sets of monthly data in Excel with different date formatting from each Ahrefs session
- You write formulas to calculate month-over-month change across 72 cells
- You finish Saturday afternoon and discover you transposed two months for competitor 2.
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 24 months of referring domain history from Ahrefs for all three domains at once, with the data aligned and the drops flagged.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Fetch 24 months of referring domains history for all three domains in column A from Ahrefs. Arrange the data with dates in column A and each domain's monthly referring domain count in separate columns B, C, and D with the domain as the column header. Flag the three months with the biggest single-month drops in any domain in column E labeled "Biggest Drops," showing which domain dropped and by how much.
SheetXAI fetches 72 data points, aligns them by month, calculates the drops, and flags the three biggest in column E. The algorithm update story has its evidence.
What You Get
A 24-row referring domain history table with flags:
- Column A — month
- Column B — client domain referring domains per month
- Column C — competitor 1 referring domains per month
- Column D — competitor 2 referring domains per month
- Column E — flags for the three biggest single-month drops
The flags do the forensics. If all three domains dropped in the same month, that is an algorithm update. If only the client dropped, that is a site-specific event.
Want a chart? Add "and create a line chart on a new tab called 'Referring Domains Trend'" to the prompt.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Referring domain trend analyses have edge cases that show up after you see the data. SheetXAI handles them in the same prompt.
When the domains in column A are inconsistently formatted
Some have https://, some are bare domains, some have trailing slashes.
Normalize all domains in column A to root domain format before fetching Ahrefs referring domain history. Then pull 24 months per domain, align by month, and flag the three biggest single-month drops in column E.
When the client wants to see the biggest gains highlighted too
The client wants their best link acquisition months called out, not just the worst.
After fetching 24 months of referring domain history for all three domains and writing to columns B through D, flag the three months with the biggest single-month drops in column E and the three months with the biggest single-month gains in column F.
When the analysis window needs to be 36 months
The client's concern dates back three years, before the last two algorithm cycles.
Fetch 36 months of referring domains history for all three domains in column A from Ahrefs. Arrange monthly values in columns B, C, D with months in column A. Flag the five biggest single-month drops across all domains in column E.
When the presentation also needs a cumulative net change summary per domain
The client wants a bottom-line number: net referring domain change over the 24-month period for each site.
After fetching 24 months of referring domain history and writing to columns B through D, add a summary row at the bottom showing the net change for each domain (final month minus first month). Label that row "24-Month Net Change."
The pattern: the history pull is one prompt. Gains, extended windows, and net change summaries extend the same prompt.
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 referring domain history from Ahrefs and flag the biggest drops. The Ahrefs integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to pull 12 months of DR history and chart trends in Excel or the Ahrefs in Excel overview.