The Scenario
You run competitive intelligence for a SaaS company and benchmark 40 competitor YouTube channels every month. The process today: open each channel handle in a new browser tab, read the subscriber count off the header, note the total video count from the About page, estimate total views from what's visible. You paste each number by hand into a spreadsheet that was supposed to be your source of truth.
The bad version:
- Search for the first channel handle, land on the wrong channel because two have similar names, go back and search again
- Find the right channel, read the subscriber count, it says "1.2M" not a precise number — paste "1.2M" as text into the sheet instead of the actual integer
- Finish 15 channels, close the browser to answer an email, realize you lost your place and have no idea which channels are done
Forty channels. Monthly cadence. By the time you finish one cycle you're nearly due for the next.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Google Sheet. It reads the sheet, resolves your channel handles via the YouTube API, and fills in the metrics. No browser tabs. No estimation.
For each channel handle in column A, look up the channel ID and then fetch subscriber count, total views, and video count — write results into columns B, C, and D
What You Get
- Column B: exact subscriber count as an integer
- Column C: total view count across the entire channel lifetime
- Column D: total published video count
- Handles that don't resolve to a valid channel get flagged in column E with a note
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Column A has a mix of handles, channel IDs, and full channel URLs
For each value in column A, detect whether it is a handle, a channel ID, or a URL — extract the identifier accordingly — then fetch subscriber count, total views, and video count into columns B, C, and D
You also need the channel's primary category and country
For each channel handle in column A, resolve the channel ID and fetch subscriber count, total views, video count, country, and topic category — write all six into columns B through G
You want to rank channels by subscriber count and add a tier label
Resolve all channel handles in column A, fetch subscriber count into column B, sort the sheet descending by column B, then add a tier label in column C: Top 10 for ranks 1 through 10, Mid for 11 through 30, Long Tail for the rest
You want a competitive delta report comparing this month to last month's tab
Compare the subscriber counts in this month's tab (column B) against last month's tab (column B) for each matching channel handle in column A — write the absolute change into column C and the percentage change into column D, flag channels that gained or lost more than 5% in column E
One prompt. No formulas, no VLOOKUP, no manual delta math.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your competitor tracking sheet — paste 40 channel handles into column A and ask SheetXAI to populate the stats. See also bulk-fetching video performance stats or return to the YouTube hub.