The Scenario
You are a content strategist. The weekly content planning meeting is Monday at 10 AM. It is Friday afternoon. You have 200 target keywords in column A of a Google Sheet — a mix of topics the editorial team has been collecting for weeks.
Before Monday's meeting you need search volume and keyword difficulty scores in columns B and C. Without them the meeting has no prioritization framework and you will spend two hours debating keywords based on instinct.
The bad version of Friday afternoon:
- You open Ahrefs Keywords Explorer
- You paste in a batch of keywords, check the volume and KD, copy the numbers manually
- Ahrefs's bulk input cap means you have to do this in multiple batches
- You paste back into the sheet, fix the column alignment, move to the next batch
- An hour in you realize you pasted 30 rows into the wrong range and have to redo that section
- You leave the office at 6:45 PM with 140 keywords done and 60 to go.
The fast version is one prompt before you pack up.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your spreadsheet that reads your keyword list and calls Ahrefs for all 200 keywords in one shot, without you managing batch sizes or copying columns by hand.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Look up the monthly search volume and keyword difficulty for every keyword in column A from Ahrefs and write the results to columns B and C. Flag any keyword with KD above 70 in column D with the label "Hard" and any with KD below 30 with "Easy." Leave column D blank for everything in between.
SheetXAI reads all 200 keywords, calls Ahrefs, writes volume and KD into columns B and C, and adds the difficulty labels in column D. The sheet is ready for Monday's meeting.
What You Get
An enriched keyword table with 200 rows:
- Column A — keyword
- Column B — monthly search volume
- Column C — keyword difficulty score
- Column D — difficulty label (Hard, Easy, or blank for mid-range)
The labels compress the decision. Monday's meeting skips the "is this keyword too hard?" debate entirely. Hard keywords go on the long-term list. Easy keywords get assigned this sprint. The editors look at the sheet for two minutes and have a plan.
Want SERP data too? Ask SheetXAI to also fetch the top 5 ranking URLs per keyword and write them to columns E through I.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Keyword lists assembled by a team over weeks are rarely clean. SheetXAI handles the list cleanup and the enrichment in the same prompt.
When keywords have inconsistent capitalization or spacing
Some keywords are all lowercase, some are title case, some have double spaces. Ahrefs treats these as different queries.
Normalize all keywords in column A to lowercase with single spaces before running the Ahrefs lookup. Then fetch search volume and KD and write to columns B and C.
When the team wants keywords grouped by topic cluster
After enrichment, the content lead wants to see keywords sorted by topic, not alphabetically.
After writing search volume to column B and KD to column C, group the rows by topic cluster based on the keyword text. Create a new sheet called "Clustered" with a header per cluster and the keywords sorted by search volume descending within each cluster.
When some rows are duplicates
The list was built by multiple team members and has repeated keywords.
Before fetching Ahrefs data, deduplicate column A removing exact duplicates (case-insensitive). Then run the search volume and KD lookup for the clean list.
When the meeting also needs SERP competitor analysis
The content director wants to know which domains dominate the top 5 positions across the keyword list, to spot authority patterns.
Fetch search volume and KD for all keywords in column A and write to columns B and C. Then for each keyword, retrieve the top 5 ranking URLs from Ahrefs and write them to columns D through H. In column I, extract the root domain from each top-ranking URL (columns D-H) and count how many times each domain appears across the full list. Write a domain frequency summary to a new sheet called "SERP Dominance."
The pattern: the enrichment runs in one call. The clustering and SERP analysis extend the same prompt without a second session.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any sheet with a keyword list, then ask it to pull search volume and KD from Ahrefs. The Ahrefs integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to expand seed keywords into related terms or the Ahrefs in Google Sheets overview.