The Scenario
A new account manager joined the PR team three weeks ago and inherited a client roster of 120 brands. Tomorrow is her first all-hands campaign review. She has the client list in column A of an Excel workbook. She does not have any sense of what has been in the news for any of them lately.
The bad version:
- Open Google News, search client brand 1, read the first few results, copy three headline titles into columns B, C, and D
- Move to client 2, search again, and realize that some brands return product announcements while others return crisis coverage, and the headlines you are selecting are inconsistent
- Work through 40 brands before the meeting prep time runs out, leaving 80 rows blank and the account manager walking into the room with partial context
Walking into a client review with incomplete coverage data is the kind of thing that erodes trust fast — especially in the first month on a new account.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the brand list in column A, queries SerpApi's Google News endpoint for each one, and writes the most recent headlines back — all 120 rows, before the meeting. One prompt.
For each company name in column A, search Google News via SerpApi and put the 3 most recent article titles and links into columns B through G
What You Get
- Columns B, D, F receive headline titles for news positions 1, 2, and 3
- Columns C, E, G receive the corresponding article URLs
- Brands with fewer than 3 recent news items leave the later columns blank
- Brands that return no results at all get a "no recent coverage" note in column B rather than an empty row
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Brand names in column A are abbreviations that return wrong results
For each brand in column A, use the full company name in column B to search Google News via SerpApi, and write the top 3 article titles and URLs into columns C through H
You only want news from the last 7 days
For each brand in column A, search Google News via SerpApi filtered to the past 7 days and write the most recent article title, source name, and publication date into columns B, C, and D; if no news exists in the last 7 days, write "no recent coverage" in column B
You want to detect sentiment signal from headline text
Search Google News via SerpApi for each brand in column A, paste the top headline into column B, then classify the headline as positive, neutral, or negative based on its language and write the classification into column C
Full cleanup, pull, and summarize in one shot
Deduplicate brand names in column A (some appear twice with slightly different spellings), search Google News via SerpApi for each unique brand, write the top 3 headline titles and URLs into columns B through G, and flag in column H any brand that has zero news coverage this month
One prompt handles the deduplication and the news pull together.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your client roster workbook before the next campaign review, then ask SheetXAI to pull the latest Google News coverage for every brand. Also see the spoke on enriching domains with Google About This Result data, or the hub overview of all SerpApi workflows.