The Scenario
You're a content marketing manager at a SaaS company. This morning your editorial assistant dropped a sheet in your inbox: 300 blog post URLs, just published, all needing branded short links before the newsletter goes out at 3 PM.
The bad version:
- Open Dub, click "Create link," paste URL 1, configure the domain, copy the result, switch back to the sheet, paste it into column B, repeat.
- Lose count somewhere around row 40 and have to scroll back to find where you left off.
- Realize at row 60 that you forgot to apply the "newsletter" tag and now need to go back through every link you created to add it.
You're supposed to be editing the newsletter copy, not operating a link factory. Three hours of your afternoon are not available for this.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Google Sheet. It reads the data in front of it and talks to Dub for you — no Zap, no script, no API dashboard required.
Open your sheet, open SheetXAI in the sidebar, and type:
Create a Dub short link for every URL in column A of the "Blog Posts" tab and write the resulting short link back to column B. Apply the tag "newsletter" to each one. Use our branded domain.
What You Get
- Column B fills with branded short links, one per row, aligned to the source URL in column A.
- Each link gets the "newsletter" tag applied in Dub at creation time.
- Any row where the destination URL is malformed or empty is flagged in column C with a note instead of silently skipped.
- The whole operation runs in one pass — no batching across multiple Zap tasks, no partial-run errors.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some URLs in column A have trailing spaces or are missing the https:// prefix
Before creating Dub short links for column A of "Blog Posts," normalize each URL: strip leading and trailing whitespace, and add https:// if the URL doesn't already start with http. Then create the short links and write them to column B.
I want to use custom keys based on the post slug in column C
For each row in my "Blog Posts" tab, use the slug in column C as the Dub custom key, the URL in column A as the destination, and write the resulting short URL to column B. Skip rows where column C is empty.
Some posts are in different categories and I want the tag to match the category in column D
Create a Dub short link for each URL in column A of "Blog Posts," applying the tag from column D as the Dub tag for that link. Write the short URL to column B. Where column D is blank, apply the default tag "content."
Clean up duplicates in column A, create links for the deduped list, and flag the removed rows
In the "Blog Posts" tab, identify duplicate values in column A. Remove the duplicates, keeping the first occurrence. Create a Dub short link for each remaining URL and write it to column B. In column E, write "duplicate removed" next to any row that was deduplicated.
One prompt can do the cleanup, the dedup logic, and the link creation — you don't have to run them as separate steps.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Google Sheet with a column of destination URLs, then ask it to bulk-create Dub short links and write them back. You can also ask it to enrich the sheet with click counts and analytics or explore the full Dub + Google Sheets guide for more workflows.