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Apify · Google Sheets Guide

Run an Apify Actor Synchronously and Analyze Output in a Google Sheet

2026-05-14
5 min read

The Scenario

You're a content strategist doing a quarterly audit. You have 50 blog post URLs in a Google Sheet — your own and a few competitors' — and you've been asked to identify which articles are under 800 words, what their H1 tags say, and whether the meta descriptions exist. Editorial wants a summary by content category by end of day.

What happened instead: a colleague who was supposed to pull this data two days ago messaged you this morning to say they'd been pulled onto something else. The spreadsheet is still empty. The summary is due at 5.

The bad version:

  • Manually visit each of the 50 URLs, right-click → view source, search for the word count, H1 tag, and meta description — 50 times.
  • Paste each into your sheet row by row, realize you missed columns on rows 12 and 31 because you lost track of which tab you were on, go back and re-check those two.
  • Spend another hour writing a summary pivot because nobody told you to include a "category average" row until you were almost done.

There are 6 hours left and you still have to write the editorial brief.

The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI

SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads what you're working with, understands the task, and through its built-in Apify integration it can run an Actor synchronously across your URL list and write the structured output back into the sheet — including conditional formatting for rows that fail a threshold.

For each URL in column A (rows 2–51), run the Apify SEO-audit Actor synchronously, write word_count into column B and h1 into column C, then highlight rows where word_count is under 800

What You Get

  • Column B contains the word count for each URL, as a number.
  • Column C contains the H1 tag text as a string.
  • Rows where word count is below 800 are highlighted in the sheet so they stand out at a glance.
  • Any URLs where the Actor returned an error or no data get a note in column D rather than a blank cell, so you can see what failed.

What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready

Some URLs in column A redirect and the Actor doesn't follow redirects by default

For each URL in column A (rows 2–51), run the Apify SEO-audit Actor with redirect-following enabled, write word_count into column B, h1 into column C, and meta_description into column D

You want to flag missing meta descriptions separately from low word count

Run the Apify SEO-audit Actor on URLs in column A rows 2–51, write word_count into B, h1 into C, and meta_description into D, then highlight column D red where meta_description is empty and highlight column B yellow where word_count is under 800

You need a per-category average and don't want to build a pivot table manually

Run the Apify SEO-audit Actor on all URLs in column A (rows 2–51), write word_count into column B, then create a new sheet called 'Category Summary' showing the average word count grouped by the content category in column D

You want the full audit and summary in one shot

For each URL in column A (rows 2–51), run the Apify SEO-audit Actor synchronously, write word_count into B, h1 into C, and meta_description into D; highlight rows where word_count is under 800 in yellow; then create a new 'Category Summary' sheet with average word count per category from column E, sorted by average ascending

Cleanup, analysis, and summary — one prompt, no pivot table wrestling.

Try It

Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any sheet where you've been collecting URLs for a content audit, then ask it to run the Apify Actor and flag the underperformers. You can also see how to trigger an Actor run from a URL list or check the Apify integration overview.

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