The Scenario
You're a content marketing manager at a B2B software company. You have an Excel workbook with twenty target keywords in column A — topics your content team is considering covering. Before committing to a production calendar, your head of content wants to see what's already been written: how much recent coverage each topic has, which outlets are producing it, and what the most recent headline looks like.
The research was supposed to take a morning. It's now Thursday afternoon and you've gotten through four keywords.
The bad version:
- For each of the twenty keywords, open the News API developer console, set the query, call the endpoint
- Scan the response to find the most recent article, note the source, count the total results
- Enter article count, source name, and headline into the workbook for that row — then move to the next keyword and start over
Twenty iterations of a manual API-call-and-paste loop is the kind of work that doesn't feel like it should exist. Nobody hired you to run forty structured search queries and transcribe the outputs.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the keywords in column A, loops through them against News API, and writes the research summary across columns B, C, and D in one pass.
For each keyword in column A of this workbook rows 2 through 21, search News API for the 10 most recent articles and write the total article count into column B, the top source domain by article frequency into column C, and the most recent headline into column D
What You Get
- Column B: total article count returned for that keyword (up to the API page limit)
- Column C: the source domain that appeared most often across the results
- Column D: headline of the most recently published article matching the keyword
- One row per keyword — same row as the keyword in column A
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some keywords return zero results
For each keyword in column A rows 2 through 21, search News API for articles from the last 30 days; write the article count into column B and mark any keyword with zero results as "NO COVERAGE" in column E
The keywords include multi-word phrases that need exact matching
For each keyword in column A, search News API using exact phrase matching (quoted string) and write article count, top source, and most recent headline into columns B, C, and D
You want the top 3 headlines per keyword instead of just the most recent
For each keyword in column A rows 2 through 10, fetch the 3 most recent articles from News API and write each article's title and URL into separate rows in Sheet2, with the parent keyword repeated in column A of each row
Full content gap pipeline in one instruction
For each keyword in column A rows 2 through 21, search News API for articles from the last 30 days; write article count into column B, top source into column C, and the most recent headline into column D; then flag any keyword with more than 20 articles as "HIGH COMPETITION" and any with fewer than 3 as "OPPORTUNITY" in column E
That final column is the deliverable your head of content actually needs to make the call on the production calendar.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the Excel workbook where your content keywords live, then ask it to run the full coverage research loop across every row and populate the summary columns. For related workflows, see historical coverage volume analysis or competitor mention tracking. Full overview: News API + Excel.