The Scenario
You are an SEO manager at a digital agency. The pitch is Thursday at 2 PM. You need a competitive authority audit for 50 domains — DR scores and referring domain counts — built into a clean spreadsheet before the deck goes out Wednesday evening.
The 50 competitor domains are already in column A. They came from your prospect's briefing doc, a mix of direct competitors and aspirational benchmarks.
The bad version of this week:
- You open Ahrefs Site Explorer and look up domain 1
- You record the DR and referring domain count manually in column B and C
- You move to domain 2
- Thirty minutes in you are on domain 8 and your eyes are glazing
- You take a break, come back, lose your place, re-check three domains you thought you had done
- You hand the account director a half-finished audit on Wednesday night and apologize.
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 list and calls Ahrefs for every domain in one shot, so you do not have to run fifty individual lookups by hand.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Fetch the Domain Rating and total referring domains for every domain in column A from Ahrefs and write the results to columns B and C. Then sort the sheet by column B descending so the highest-authority domains appear at the top.
SheetXAI reads all 50 domains, calls Ahrefs, writes DR into column B and referring domains into column C, and sorts the table. The authority audit is done.
What You Get
A ranked competitive authority table with 50 rows:
- Column A — the domain
- Column B — Domain Rating (sorted descending)
- Column C — total referring domains
- Sorted view — highest authority competitors at the top, lowest at the bottom
The sort makes the pitch story obvious. The domains at the top of the table are the authority benchmarks. The ones at the bottom are the reachable wins. You do not have to explain it — the order does it for you.
Want to go deeper? Ask SheetXAI to add a column for estimated organic traffic, or to flag any domain with DR above 70 in red and below 20 in green for instant visual segmentation.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Competitor lists from client briefing docs are rarely clean. SheetXAI handles the list cleanup and the audit in the same prompt.
When some domains have inconsistent formatting
Half the list has https:// prefixes, some have trailing slashes, a few are subdomains instead of root domains.
Normalize all domains in column A to root domain format (no protocol, no trailing slash, no www) before fetching Ahrefs data. Then run the bulk DR and referring domains lookup and write results to columns B and C.
When the client wants the top 10 highlighted separately
The account director wants a summary callout of the top 10 highest-DR competitors for the exec slide.
After fetching DR and referring domains for all domains in column A and writing to columns B and C, copy the top 10 rows by DR into a new sheet called "Top 10 Benchmarks" with a header row.
When some domains return no data
A few domains are too new or too small for Ahrefs to have indexed data on them.
Fetch DR and referring domains for all domains in column A from Ahrefs. If Ahrefs returns no data for a domain, write "No data" in columns B and C instead of leaving them blank. Write results to columns B and C and sort by column B descending, treating "No data" rows as lowest.
When the brief also needs the top 20 backlinks per domain
The pitch team wants a Backlinks tab with source domain, anchor text, and DR for the top 20 backlinks of each competitor.
Fetch DR and referring domains for each domain in column A and write them to columns B and C. Then for each domain, retrieve the top 20 backlinks including source domain, anchor text, and source DR, and paste them into a new sheet called Backlinks with the parent domain in column D so each set of backlinks is labeled.
The pattern: instead of running fifty individual Site Explorer sessions, you give SheetXAI the full list and it handles every domain in one pass. The Backlinks tab is the same prompt, more columns.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any sheet with a list of competitor domains, then ask it to pull DR and referring domain data from Ahrefs. The Ahrefs integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to build a full competitive SEO matrix or the Ahrefs in Google Sheets overview.