The Scenario
You are a link building specialist at an e-commerce company. Your outreach quota this week is 50 targeted reclamation emails. It is Monday morning. You need a list of broken backlinks pointing to your domain — referring URL, anchor text, and the broken destination URL — so you can prioritize the outreach by source authority.
The bad version of Monday morning:
- You open Ahrefs Site Explorer for your domain
- You go to Backlinks, filter to broken, set the target to your domain
- You export the CSV, which has 30 columns you do not need
- You open the CSV in Sheets, delete 27 columns, rename the three you kept
- You sort by DR to find the highest-authority broken backlinks
- You realize the export only captured the first 1,000 rows and you need to paginate
- You spend 90 minutes setting up the list before sending a single email.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your spreadsheet that reads the domain from the sheet and pulls the broken backlinks report from Ahrefs directly, so you do not have to touch the export flow.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Fetch all broken backlinks for the domain in cell A1 from Ahrefs. List the referring URL in column A, anchor text in column B, and broken destination URL in column C. Sort by referring domain DR descending so the highest-authority opportunities appear first.
SheetXAI calls Ahrefs, writes the three columns, and sorts the table by source authority. The outreach list is ready.
What You Get
A prioritized broken backlink table:
- Column A — referring URL (the page linking to you with a broken link)
- Column B — anchor text used in the link
- Column C — the broken destination URL on your site (what you need to fix or redirect)
- Sorted — highest DR referring domains at the top
The sort is the outreach strategy. You work from the top of the list. A DR 80 site linking to a broken page on your domain is worth a personal email. A DR 5 site is a form submission. The sort makes that decision automatic.
Want to go further? Ask SheetXAI to also add a column for the referring domain's DR and another for whether the destination URL has a redirect in place, and it will flag which broken links already have a fix and which ones still need one.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Broken backlink lists often need filtering before they are outreach-ready. SheetXAI handles cleanup and filtering in the same prompt.
When you only want broken links above a certain DR threshold
Not every broken backlink is worth pursuing. Anything below DR 20 is probably not worth a manual email.
Fetch all broken backlinks for the domain in cell A1 from Ahrefs. Filter to referring domains with DR 20 or above. Write referring URL to column A, anchor text to column B, and broken destination URL to column C. Sort by DR descending.
When some broken destination URLs have been redirected already
Your dev team set up 301 redirects for some of the broken URLs last month. You do not want to email partners about links that are already working.
Fetch broken backlinks for the domain in A1 from Ahrefs. For each broken destination URL in column C, check if a redirect is already in place. Mark those rows "Redirect exists" in column D. Mark the rest "Needs fix." Sort by column D so the "Needs fix" rows appear first.
When multiple domains need an audit
You manage three e-commerce brands and need the broken backlink report for all three.
For each domain in cells A1, A2, and A3, fetch broken backlinks from Ahrefs and write them to three separate sheets named after each domain. In each sheet, include referring URL, anchor text, broken destination URL, and source DR. Sort each sheet by DR descending.
When the outreach team needs a prioritized hit list with contact info columns
The outreach manager wants a ready-to-use sheet with empty columns for contact name and email, pre-labeled and sorted.
Fetch broken backlinks for the domain in A1 from Ahrefs. Filter to DR 30 or above. Write referring URL to column A, anchor text to column B, broken destination URL to column C. Add blank columns D and E labeled "Contact Name" and "Contact Email." Sort by DR descending. Stop at 100 rows.
The pattern: the broken backlink pull is one prompt. Filtering, redirect-checking, and adding outreach columns extend it without switching tools.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open a sheet with your domain in cell A1, then ask it to pull broken backlinks from Ahrefs. The Ahrefs integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to pull DR and referring domains for a bulk competitor audit or the Ahrefs in Google Sheets overview.