The Scenario
You're three worksheets deep in your Excel workbook — a column of 15 competitor brand names that hasn't changed in months, a column of last week's notes from whoever ran this manually before you, and two empty columns where this week's headlines are supposed to go.
The person who built this tracker left the company in February. What they left behind is a template and a note that says "use Currents API, five articles per brand." What they didn't leave behind is any documentation on how they did it.
The bad version:
- Open the Currents API docs, find the search endpoint, paste the first brand name into the URL and hit it in your browser — get back a wall of JSON, fish out the five most recent results
- Open the workbook, find the right row, type in headline, source, date, and URL for each of the five articles, then scroll back up and grab the next brand name
- Repeat fourteen more times while the worksheet you actually needed to be working in sits untouched
That's the session. An hour and a half on a task that should take three minutes — and you'll do it again next Monday, and the Monday after that.
The tracker needs to exist. Your job is to do something useful with the data in it, not to be the mechanism that fills it.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that runs inside your Excel workbook. It reads your column A, understands you have a list of brand names, and through its built-in Currents API integration it fetches the news and writes results directly into the workbook for you — no endpoint wrangling, no JSON parsing.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and ask:
For each company name in column A (rows 2 through 16), use Currents API to fetch the 5 most recent news articles mentioning that company and write headline, source, publish date, and article URL into columns B through E — add a blank row between each company's results
What You Get
- Column B: article headline for each result
- Column C: source name (publication or outlet)
- Column D: publish date formatted as YYYY-MM-DD
- Column E: full article URL
- A blank row between each company's result set, keeping the groups visually separated
- If a company name returns zero results for the week, SheetXAI notes "no results" in column B for that row rather than silently skipping it
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The company names include legal suffixes that trip up the search
Some of your column A entries say "Acme Corp." or "GlobalTech Inc." — and the search returns nothing because Currents API is matching the full string literally.
For each company name in column A rows 2–16, strip any legal suffixes (Inc., Corp., Ltd., LLC) before searching Currents API, then fetch the 5 most recent articles and write headline, source, date, and URL into columns B–E
You need the results deduplicated — the same article is showing up for multiple brands
If two competitors get mentioned in the same story, the same headline is landing multiple times across your tracker.
After fetching news for each company in column A and writing results into columns B–E, check for duplicate article URLs across all rows and mark any duplicates in column F with "DUPLICATE" so I can review them
The tracker has a Notes column in column C that you don't want overwritten
Your workbook has existing content in column C that you want to preserve. The news results should land in different columns.
For each company in column A rows 2–16, fetch the 5 most recent Currents API articles and write headline into column D, source into column E, publish date into column F, and URL into column G — leave column C untouched
You want cleanup, dedup, and a summary count in one shot
The tracker's a mess — mixed legal suffixes, a few blank rows, and the last person's partial results still sitting in columns B through E from three weeks ago.
Clear columns B through E for rows 2–50, strip legal suffixes from each company name in column A, skip any blank rows, fetch the 5 most recent Currents API articles per company, write headline/source/date/URL into B–E, deduplicate by URL across all rows, and write a count of articles found per company into column F
Ask for the cleanup and the fetch in one prompt — SheetXAI handles both in the same pass.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your competitor tracking workbook, then ask it to pull this week's Currents API coverage for every brand in your list. When you're done, see how the same approach works for multilingual press monitoring or explore the full Currents API guide.