The Scenario
A YouTube channel manager got a direct message from the founder: "Can you send me a list of what's ranking for our main topics before the team call Thursday?" The channel has 40 content topic ideas queued up for the quarter. The call is in two days.
The bad version:
- Search topic 1 on YouTube, look at the first 5 results, copy the video title, channel name, view count, and publish date into 4 columns per row
- Search topic 2, then topic 3, noticing that YouTube's search results vary based on whether you are logged in, your location, your watch history — making the results you pull potentially different from what a neutral search would return
- Work through 15 topics before realizing the remaining 25 will take another few hours, and that there is no guarantee the data from the first 15 is comparable to what you would get for the last 25 if you had done them all at once
The founder asked for a competitive snapshot, not a methodologically inconsistent sample.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the topic list in column A, calls SerpApi's YouTube search endpoint using consistent, session-neutral parameters, and writes the results back — all 40 rows, in one pass. One prompt.
For each topic in column A, search YouTube via SerpApi and paste the top 5 video titles, channel names, and view counts into the next 15 columns
What You Get
- For each of the top 5 videos: title, channel name, and view count each land in their own column
- All 40 topics are pulled with the same neutral search parameters, making the results comparable row to row
- Topics with fewer than 5 results get blanks in the later column groups rather than shifting data
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You also want publish date for freshness scoring
For each topic in column A, search YouTube via SerpApi and write the top 5 video titles, channel names, view counts, and upload dates into the next 20 columns
You only want videos published in the last 12 months
For each topic in column A, search YouTube via SerpApi filtered to videos published in the last 12 months and write the top 5 video titles, channel names, and view counts into the next 15 columns
You want to flag topics where the top video has over 1 million views
Search YouTube via SerpApi for each topic in column A, write the top video title, channel, and view count into columns B, C, and D, and flag in column E any topic where the top result has more than 1,000,000 views
Full pull, sort, and gap analysis in one prompt
Search YouTube via SerpApi for each topic in column A, write the top 3 video titles, channels, and view counts into columns B through G, calculate the average view count of the top 3 results for each topic in column H, and flag in column I any topic where the average is below 50,000 as a potential content gap
The opportunity flagging and the data pull happen together.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your content topic workbook before the next team planning call, then ask SheetXAI to pull YouTube search results for every idea. Also see the spoke on pulling Google Trends scores for demand validation, or the hub overview of all SerpApi workflows.