The Scenario
You are a merchandising manager at a retail company. Your engineering team is migrating to a new Algolia index next quarter. The old index has 150 active rules, merchandising rules that pin certain products to the top of search results, hide others, and redirect queries to curated landing pages.
Before the migration, your VP wants to know: which rules are we keeping, which are we retiring? You have three weeks to review them. You need every rule exported to a Google Sheet, one row per rule, with the condition and consequence visible.
You have never used the Algolia Rules API.
The bad version of this week:
- You page through the Algolia dashboard rules section, 20 rules at a time
- You copy rule IDs and their descriptions into a sheet by hand
- By rule 50 you are not sure if you already exported rule 47
- You realize the dashboard does not show the full consequence detail in the list view
- You click into each rule individually to read the consequence
- By Friday you have 80 of 150 rules captured and you are behind schedule
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your spreadsheet that pulls every rule from the Algolia index and writes them into the sheet in one go.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Export all rules from my Algolia index 'products' into this sheet with one rule per row. Include objectID, condition query, condition anchoring, and a plain-English description of the consequence. Sort by objectID ascending.
SheetXAI calls the Algolia Rules API, paginates through all 150 rules, and writes each one into the sheet with the fields you specified.
What You Get
A complete rules inventory with:
- objectID — the rule identifier for cross-referencing with engineering
- Condition query — what search term triggers the rule
- Condition anchoring — whether the query must match at start, end, or anywhere
- Consequence description — what the rule does, written in plain English so non-technical reviewers can act on it
- 150 rows — every rule, no paging through the dashboard
The plain-English consequence column is what makes this reviewable. Instead of reading raw JSON, your VP sees "pins product ID 4821 to position 1 when query contains 'blue jeans'" and can decide immediately.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Rules audits usually surface questions the raw export does not answer.
When you want to tag each rule by type for the migration plan
Pinning rules, redirect rules, and filter rules have different migration paths. You want to categorize them.
Export all rules from my Algolia index 'products' into this sheet. For each rule, infer whether it is a pinning rule, a redirect rule, or a filter rule based on the consequence. Write the type to column E. Sort by type then by objectID.
When you want to identify rules that have not been triggered in 90 days
Stale rules are candidates for deletion. You want to cross-reference the rules export with analytics to find low-activity rules.
Export all rules from my Algolia index 'products' to this sheet. Then fetch the Algolia analytics to find which rule objectIDs had zero trigger events in the last 90 days. Write "STALE" in column F for any rule with no recent activity.
When you want to compare the rules in the old index against a new index to find gaps
The new index was pre-populated with a subset of rules. You want to find which rules exist in the old index but not the new one.
Export all rule objectIDs from my Algolia index 'products' to column A. Export all rule objectIDs from my Algolia index 'products_v2' to column C. Write any objectID that appears in column A but not column C to column E and label it "Missing from new index."
When you want to re-import the reviewed rules into the new index after editing
You have reviewed and edited the rules in the sheet. Now you want to push the approved ones to the new index.
Read all rows in the Rules sheet where column G says "Approved." For each row, create a rule in my Algolia index 'products_v2' using the objectID, condition, and consequence from the sheet. Report how many rules were created successfully.
The pattern: export everything first, review in the sheet, push only what you want. The spreadsheet is the review layer between the old state and the new one.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open a blank sheet, then ask it to export all rules from your Algolia index. The Algolia integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to export your full index for data quality auditing or the Algolia in Google Sheets overview.