The Scenario
You are a content marketing manager at a B2B media company. You are setting editorial guidelines for Q3. Before you can write them, you need to understand how aggressively the 20 top authority sites in your industry link out — their total outlink counts and how many distinct external domains they link to.
The 20 sites are in column A. You need outlink stats in columns B and C by end of the week so the editorial team can benchmark your own linking behavior against the industry standard.
The bad version of this week:
- You open Ahrefs for site 1, navigate to Outlinks, record the total outlinks and linked domains count
- You repeat for site 2, site 3
- Eight sites in, you realize you recorded the total links count for two sites using the "outlinks" view and the "linking pages" view, which report different numbers
- You go back and standardize
- You have 20 sites and it takes most of Friday.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your spreadsheet that reads the site list and pulls outlink statistics from Ahrefs for all 20 domains in one shot.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
For each domain in column A, fetch outlinks statistics from Ahrefs including total outlinks and number of distinct external domains linked. Write total outlinks to column B and external domains count to column C. Sort the sheet by column C descending so the most aggressive linkers appear first.
SheetXAI reads all 20 domains, calls Ahrefs, writes both columns, and sorts the sheet. The benchmark table is ready for the editorial meeting.
What You Get
A ranked outlink benchmark table with 20 rows:
- Column A — the domain
- Column B — total outlinks
- Column C — number of distinct external domains linked
- Sorted — highest external domain count at the top
The ratio matters. A site with 500 total outlinks but only 10 external domains is linking heavily to a small set of partners. A site with 500 outlinks to 400 different domains is linking broadly. Column B over column C tells you whether a site's linking strategy is concentrated or distributed — that is the editorial signal.
Want the full linked-domains list for one specific site? Ask SheetXAI to pull the list of external domains that a particular site links to, with outbound link counts sorted descending.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Outlink audits often need filtering and segmentation before they are useful for policy decisions. SheetXAI handles them in the same prompt.
When you want to exclude sites that are clearly news aggregators
A few of the 20 sites are news aggregators that link out to thousands of external domains by nature. They skew the benchmark.
For each domain in column A, fetch outlinks statistics from Ahrefs and write total outlinks to column B and external domains to column C. Add a column D where you label any site with more than 10,000 external domains as "Aggregator." Sort by column C descending.
When the editorial team wants the top 5 external domains per site
The guidelines committee wants to see which sites each authority domain links to most frequently.
After fetching outlink statistics for all domains in column A and writing to columns B and C, pull the top 5 external domains linked by each site and write them to a new sheet called "Top External Links" with the parent domain in column A and the top 5 linked domains in columns B through F, with outbound link counts in the adjacent columns.
When you want to filter to sites that link out fewer than 500 times
The editorial guidelines are meant for sites with moderate linking behavior. Very high linkers are outliers.
Fetch outlink statistics for all domains in column A from Ahrefs. Filter to sites with fewer than 500 total outlinks. Write total outlinks to column B and external domains count to column C. Sort by column B ascending so the most conservative linkers appear first.
When the guidelines team also needs a ratio column
The policy decision comes down to the outlinks-per-external-domain ratio — how tightly concentrated is each site's linking behavior?
Fetch outlink statistics for all 20 domains in column A from Ahrefs. Write total outlinks to column B and external domains to column C. In column D, calculate the ratio of column B to column C (outlinks per distinct external domain) and label it "Links per Domain." Sort by column D ascending so the most distributed linkers appear first.
The pattern: the outlink pull is one prompt. Ratios, filtering, and top-domain expansion extend the same prompt without a new Ahrefs session.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any sheet with a list of authority domains, then ask it to pull outlink statistics 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.