The Scenario
You're a product manager at a fintech startup. Your company tracks 8 competitor brands. Staying current on what they're shipping, who they're partnering with, and what the press is saying about them is part of the job — not a luxury, a baseline expectation when your VP asks "what's Stripe doing with their new checkout flow?"
Every week, someone on the team is supposed to send around a competitor update. That someone has been you for the past three months. The process: open a browser, search each competitor name on Google News, read through the results, manually paste the 5 most relevant headlines, sources, and URLs into a shared Excel workbook. Eight companies, five headlines each, forty rows, done by Monday morning.
The bad version:
- Search "Brex news" on Google News. Try to find articles from the past 7 days specifically, not the general results that include a 2-month-old TechCrunch piece. Skim 15 results. Pick 5. Copy each title, source name, date, and URL by hand.
- Repeat for the next competitor. Realize you mixed up which worksheet you were copying into and pasted three Brex headlines into the Stripe section. Fix it.
- It's Sunday night. You have 3 of 8 competitors done.
This is infrastructure work. It needs to exist, and it needs to run every week, and right now it takes a Sunday evening to produce it.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the company list in column A and queries Composio Search's news tool for each competitor, then writes headlines, sources, dates, and URLs into rows below each company name.
For each company name in column A, search for the 5 most recent news articles from the past 7 days and write the title, source name, date, and URL into rows below the company name, with the company name repeated in column A on each result row.
Eight competitors, five headlines each, 40 structured rows, in a single pass.
What You Get
- Column A: Company name repeated on each result row
- Column B: Article headline
- Column C: Source publication name
- Column D: Publication date
- Column E: Article URL
- Articles are from the past 7 days; older results are excluded
- Rows with no recent news return a single row labeled 'No news in past 7 days'
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You want only product launch or press release announcements
General news is too noisy. You want only product or feature announcements.
Find the 3 most recent press releases or product launch announcements for each competitor brand in column A from the past 30 days and add headline, source, and date to new rows.
Some competitor names are ambiguous and need extra context
"Stripe" returns news about actual stripes. You need to clarify with "Stripe payments."
For each company in column A, use the search context from column B (which contains a one-sentence description of the company) to disambiguate the news search and return the 5 most relevant recent articles. Write title, source, date, and URL into rows below each company.
You want to tag each headline by topic
Product launches, funding, partnerships, and regulatory news all go into different sections of the weekly brief.
For each company in column A, search for the 5 most recent news articles and write title, source, date, and URL into rows below the company name. Then classify each article as 'Product', 'Funding', 'Partnership', or 'Other' in column F.
Kill chain: fetch news, classify, deduplicate cross-company coverage, and flag high-priority stories
For each company in column A, search for the 5 most recent news articles from the past 7 days, write title, source, date, and URL into rows below the company name, classify each article in column F, remove any article that appears under more than one company (same URL), and mark any article mentioning funding rounds or acquisitions with 'High Priority' in column G.
One pass builds the full digest, removes duplicates, and surfaces what leadership will ask about.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your competitor tracking workbook. Ask it to pull the latest 5 headlines per competitor for every row and build this week's digest in one shot. See also: Score Keywords by Google Trends Interest in an Excel workbook With Composio Search or the Composio Search hub.