The Scenario
You inherited an Excel workbook from the analyst who left last quarter. Column A has 50 competitor URLs. The note at the top says "scrape weekly for pricing." There is no script. There is no automation. There is a column B with the header "Raw HTML" and nothing in it.
The bad version:
- Open Scrape.do's API docs, construct a request URL for row 2, copy the response body, paste into B2
- Repeat 49 more times, stopping to troubleshoot when row 23 returns a 403 and row 41 times out
- Spend another 30 minutes reformatting line breaks in the pasted HTML before it is readable
This is supposed to be a weekly task. Forty-nine manual round-trips every Monday is not a weekly task — it is a recurring commitment that grows more painful each week as the URL list expands.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the workbook, understands your column layout, and through its built-in Scrape.do integration it sends each URL through Scrape.do's proxy infrastructure and writes the result back — row by row, without you touching a single cell.
Scrape each URL in column A using Scrape.do and write the raw HTML response into column B. Skip any rows where column A is blank.
What You Get
- Column B fills with the scraped HTML body for each URL in column A
- Rows with blank URLs in column A are left untouched
- Cells where Scrape.do returns a non-200 status show the error code instead of failing silently
- The run processes in sequence so you can watch the column populate as it goes
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The URLs have trailing spaces and mixed http/https schemes
Before scraping, clean column A: trim whitespace from each URL and standardize all entries to https://. Then scrape each cleaned URL using Scrape.do and write the HTML response into column B.
Some rows should be skipped based on a status flag in column C
Scrape only the URLs in column A where column C says "active". Write the Scrape.do HTML response into column B. Leave rows where column C is anything other than "active" untouched.
You want plain text, not raw HTML
For each URL in column A, scrape the page using Scrape.do and write the extracted plain-text content — no HTML tags — into column B. Trim leading and trailing whitespace from each result.
Cleanup plus extraction in one shot
Clean column A first: trim whitespace, fix broken URLs missing the https:// prefix. Then scrape each URL using Scrape.do, extract the plain-text page content, and write it into column B. Flag any rows where the response status was not 200 by writing the status code into column C.
The pattern holds regardless of what is wrong upstream — ask for the cleanup and the scraping action together, and SheetXAI handles both in sequence.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook with a list of competitor or product URLs in column A, then ask it to scrape them all and populate column B. See also the spoke on scraping JavaScript-rendered pages, or the hub overview for all Scrape.do workflows.