The Scenario
It's Monday morning and your research folder has been sitting untouched since last Friday. You're a market analyst at a SaaS company and someone on the leadership team sent a workbook with 50 competitor company names over the weekend. They want a paragraph-length summary of what each one does, plus a source URL, before the competitive review meeting on Wednesday.
The bad version:
- Open Exa, paste in company name 1, read three results, decide which one is most accurate, write a summary in your own words, copy the source URL, switch back to the workbook, paste both into row 1
- Repeat for row 2, row 3, and 47 more rows across the next day and a half
- Realize on Tuesday afternoon that you summarized three companies based on outdated Exa results because you got faster and less careful as you went
The thing nobody tells you when you're handed a task like this is that writing 50 summaries from scratch isn't research — it's transcription. The actual thinking — what distinguishes each company, what's strategically interesting — gets lost when the mechanical part of the job consumes the whole afternoon.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the workbook, understands the data you're looking at, and through its built-in Exa integration it can run web searches for each row and write the cited results back — without any configuration on your end.
For each company name in column A of my Excel workbook, use Exa to find a cited answer about what the company does and write the summary into column B and the top source URL into column C
What You Get
- Column B fills with a one-paragraph AI-generated description for each company
- Column C receives the top Exa source URL used to generate each summary
- Rows where Exa returned low-confidence results are flagged so you can review them
- The workbook updates in place — no separate output file to merge back in
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Company names have inconsistent formatting
Some cells say "Acme Corp", others say "ACME", others say "Acme Corporation (US)". Exa handles most variations but edge cases slip through.
Normalize the company names in column A before running the Exa research — strip trailing parenthetical labels like "(US)" or "(UK)", then use Exa to look up each cleaned name and write the summary to column B and the source URL to column C
Some rows are already filled in from a previous run
You ran half the workbook last week. You don't want to overwrite the rows that already have summaries.
For every row where column B is empty, use Exa to research the company name in column A and fill in the summary and source URL — skip any rows that already have content in column B
You want the research scoped to a specific time window
Leadership wants to know what these companies are doing now, not what they were doing three years ago.
For each company name in column A, query Exa with a recency filter for results published in the last 12 months, write the summary to column B, and note the publication date of the source in column D
Full pipeline: normalize, skip filled rows, filter recency, add competitive flag
Normalize company names in column A, skip rows where column B already has content, query Exa with a 12-month recency filter for the remaining rows, write the summary to column B and source URL to column C, then assess competitive overlap and write "Direct competitor", "Adjacent", or "Not relevant" to column D
One prompt, three output columns, no manual review loop.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with a list of company names — even an unclean one — then ask it to run Exa research and write cited summaries to the adjacent columns. For related reads, see how to enrich a prospect list with web data or build a news digest workbook.