Research a Dev.to User's Articles Into a Excel workbook

The Scenario

A content strategist at a SaaS company is putting together the quarterly editorial calendar. Her job is to find the gaps — topics the technical audience cares about that her blog hasn't covered but competitors have. She's done this before by reading through a competitor's DEV Community profile page by page. The profile has 80+ posts. There is no sort. There is no filter. She's scrolling.

The bad version:

• Open the competitor's DEV Community profile. Scroll down to load more articles. Click into each one to see the tags and check the reaction count. Note titles and tags in a scratch doc somewhere.
• Do this for every article, knowing you'll miss some because DEV's infinite scroll is unreliable.
• Manually transfer your notes into the workbook, realizing partway through that you forgot to record reading times and have to go back.

This is supposed to inform a strategic decision. The quality of the analysis is bottlenecked by how much patience you have for scrolling a profile page.

The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI

SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It connects to the Dev.to API and can pull every article published by any public DEV username into your workbook in one request — titles, tags, engagement numbers, all of it.

Open the SheetXAI sidebar and paste:

Fetch all published DEV Community articles by username 'ben' and write them to the CompetitorAnalysis worksheet — columns for title in A, article URL in B, tags in C, reaction count in D, comment count in E, and published date in F. Sort by reaction count descending.

What You Get

• One row per article by the specified DEV username.
• Columns A–F populated with title, URL, tags, reactions, comments, and published date.
• Sorted by reaction count so the highest-engagement articles are immediately visible.
• No manual scrolling, no missed posts — all articles returned by the API are captured.

What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready

The username is stored in the workbook, not hardcoded in the prompt

You have a list of competitor usernames in column A of a lookup worksheet and you want to pull articles for whichever one is in cell A1.

Fetch all published DEV Community articles by the username in cell A1 of the Competitors worksheet, and write them to CompetitorAnalysis — title in A, URL in B, tags in C, reactions in D, published date in E.

You want to filter to articles from the past 12 months only

The account has five years of posts. You only want the recent ones to understand current strategy.

Fetch all published DEV Community articles by username 'vitalik' published on or after May 14, 2025, and write them to CompetitorAnalysis — title, URL, tags, reaction count, comment count, published date. Skip anything older.

You want to tag articles by topic cluster automatically

You want SheetXAI to categorize each article into one of three buckets — "web dev," "cloud/infra," or "other" — based on its tags.

Pull all published DEV Community articles by username 'ben' into CompetitorAnalysis — title in A, tags in B, reactions in C, published date in D. In column E, classify each article as "web dev" if tags include html/css/javascript, "cloud/infra" if tags include kubernetes/aws/docker, or "other" if neither. Then add a summary row at the bottom counting articles per category.

Pull multiple competitors, deduplicate shared topics, and rank gaps

You have three competitor usernames in cells A1:A3. You want to find topics they all cover that your workbook (in the MyContent sheet, column C) does not.

For each username in cells A1:A3 of the Competitors worksheet, fetch all their published DEV Community articles and compile them in AllCompetitorArticles — username in A, title in B, tags in C. Then compare the tags in column C against the tags in column C of the MyContent worksheet, and write any tags that appear in competitor articles but not mine into the ContentGaps worksheet, with a count of how many competitors covered each.

That last prompt does the research, the deduplication, and the gap analysis in one pass — so the editorial meeting has a ranked list to work from, not a pile of exported data.

Try It

Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open an Excel workbook set up for competitive content research — drop a competitor's DEV username into cell A1, then ask SheetXAI to pull their full article history with engagement data. The Dev.to integration is included in every SheetXAI plan.

See also: Pull your own DEV article engagement metrics into an Excel workbook and the Dev.to integration hub.