How to Connect Cutt.ly to Google Sheets (4 Methods Compared)

The Problem With Getting Sheet Data In and Out of Cutt.ly

You have a Google Sheet full of URLs — campaign landing pages, affiliate links, partner referral strings — and you need short links before anything goes live. The default flow is opening Cutt.ly in a browser tab, pasting each URL one at a time, copying the result, and switching back to the sheet to paste it in. For five links that's annoying. For fifty it's a half-morning gone.

Cutt.ly is good at taking a long URL and giving you back a clean, trackable short one. But every method of connecting it to your spreadsheet requires something — a script, an integration platform, or a lot of patience — that most people doing this work don't want to maintain.

Below are the four ways teams handle this. Only the last one treats your spreadsheet as the starting point.

Method 1: Manual Copy-Paste

The default workflow: you have a column of long URLs, you go to Cutt.ly, you paste the first one, copy the result, come back to the sheet, paste it in column B, move to row 2, and repeat.

For a one-time batch of three or four links it's tolerable. But the links don't stay static. A campaign adds ten new landing pages. A partner sends a fresh affiliate list. An asset gets updated and the old URL breaks, so the short link needs to be re-created.

Every time the list changes, someone starts the loop again. After the third campaign cycle, that someone is you, staring at row 47 out of 120, wondering at what point this stopped being marketing work and became data entry.

Method 2: Zapier or Make

Both platforms have a Cutt.ly connector. You can build a trigger that fires when a new row lands in the sheet, calls the Cutt.ly API with the URL from column A, and writes the short link back into column B.

A few questions before you go further — do you know what a Zap trigger is? Have you authenticated a third-party API connector before? Are you comfortable mapping fields between a webhook payload and a spreadsheet column? If those feel unfamiliar, this path isn't the right one. Skip to Method 3 or 4.

If you're still here: setup is straightforward enough. You pick a Google Sheets trigger, configure the Cutt.ly action step, map column A to the URL field, and point the result back to column B. Zapier's Cutt.ly action handles the API call.

But a row-by-row trigger is not the same as a bulk operation.

Shortening 120 URLs means 120 separate trigger fires. If one row has a malformed URL, that task fails silently while the rest continue, and you're left with gaps in column B you didn't notice until the campaign went out.

You probably just need the short links. You probably haven't built a Zap before and have no particular interest in starting now. So you find the person on your team who handles automation and drop them a message — and now you're waiting on a Slack reply while the deadline is this afternoon.

Even when it's built, chaining more logic — using a custom alias from column C, skipping rows that already have a short link — means adding more steps, more conditions, more things to break.

Method 3: The Previous Generation — Connector Add-Ons

Until recently, the best option for repeatable spreadsheet-to-API workflows was a category of add-ons that let you configure column mappings and save them as templates. You picked your range, you mapped the fields, you saved the config, you ran it.

That was a real step up from doing it row by row in a browser.

But you were still the one defining which column was the input, which was the output, what happened when a field was empty, whether to skip rows that already had a value. The add-on executed the call. The logic was yours to design and maintain.

And if you renamed column A to "Landing Page URL" instead of "URL," your saved config broke until someone went back in and updated the field mapping.

This is the previous generation. It worked, but it never stopped asking things of the operator.

The Easy Way: Using SheetXAI in Google Sheets

There is a different way entirely. SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads your data, understands what you're looking at, and through its built-in Cutt.ly integration it can shorten URLs, retrieve link history, and write results back to your sheet. No config, no Zap, no mapping. You just ask.

Example 1: Shorten a column of affiliate URLs with optional custom aliases

For every URL in column A of my sheet, use Cutt.ly to create a shortened link and write the short URL into column B — if column C has a custom alias, use it for that row

SheetXAI reads column A, sends each URL to Cutt.ly, applies the alias from column C where one exists, and writes the resulting short links into column B. Rows without an alias get auto-generated slugs.

Example 2: Pull recent link history into the sheet

Pull my most recently shortened URLs from Cutt.ly and write them into this sheet — short URL in column A, original URL in column B, date created in column C

The pattern: instead of exporting a CSV from Cutt.ly and reformatting it, you ask for the pull and the column layout in one prompt. SheetXAI handles the field placement inline.

Try It

Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Google Sheet with a column of URLs, then ask it to shorten them with Cutt.ly. The Cutt.ly integration is included in every SheetXAI plan.