The Scenario
Every Monday morning, your communications director sends a Slack message that says some version of: "Can someone put together a news briefing on our key industry topics before the 10 AM standup?" You're the operations coordinator who ends up doing it, and it takes 45 minutes every single week.
There's a Google Sheet sitting in your team's shared drive with 12 industry keywords in column A. The brief is supposed to cover the 5 most recent news articles for each keyword — title, URL, and publication date. That's 60 rows of news data to find, verify, format, and paste before 10 AM.
The bad version:
- Search for "keyword 1 news", scan the results, pick 5 articles that are genuinely recent and relevant (not just SEO-optimized evergreen content), note the title, URL, and date for each
- Paste all 15 cells across columns B, C, and D for keyword 1
- Repeat 11 more times, racing the clock, knowing that by keyword 9 you're going to start making shortcuts on what counts as "recent"
By the time you finish, you've done 45 minutes of work that adds no original thinking and will be repeated identically next Monday. The briefing itself takes 5 minutes to read. The assembly takes 45 minutes to produce. That ratio is wrong.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the sheet, understands your data, and through its built-in Exa integration it can search for recent news articles for each keyword in your list and write the results — title, URL, and date — directly into the adjacent columns.
Search Exa for the 5 most recent news articles for each keyword in column A of my Google Sheet and write the article title, URL, and publication date into the adjacent columns B through D for each keyword, adding a new group of rows per keyword
What You Get
- For each keyword, 5 rows populate with the article title (column B), article URL (column C), and publication date (column D)
- Results are sorted by recency — the most recent article appears first within each keyword's group
- Keywords that returned fewer than 5 recent results are noted so you can manually supplement or broaden the search
- The sheet is ready to share or export as a PDF briefing with no further formatting
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some keywords are too broad and return generic evergreen content
"Marketing" as a keyword returns articles that are years old and optimized for search. You need recency filtering.
For each keyword in column A, search Exa with a recency filter for articles published in the last 30 days only, retrieve the 5 most recent results, and write the title, URL, and publication date to columns B through D
You want to exclude specific sources that your director finds unreliable
Two or three domains consistently show up in results but aren't considered credible by your team.
For each keyword in column A, search Exa for the 5 most recent news articles, exclude any results from the following domains: [domain1.com, domain2.com], and write the remaining top 5 titles, URLs, and publication dates to columns B through D
You want a one-line AI summary alongside each article
Your director prefers to scan the briefing without clicking through. A sentence of context per article saves time.
For each keyword in column A, find the 5 most recent news articles via Exa, write the title to column B, URL to column C, and publication date to column D, then write a one-sentence summary of what the article covers to column E
Full pipeline: filter by recency, exclude specific sources, add summaries, flag duplicates
Search Exa for each keyword in column A, filter to the last 30 days only, exclude results from [domain1.com, domain2.com], write the top 5 titles to column B, URLs to column C, dates to column D, and a one-sentence summary to column E, then check for any article URL that appears under more than one keyword and mark it "Cross-topic" in column F
Monday's briefing, ready before the standup.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your news briefing sheet with industry keywords in column A, then ask it to pull the latest Exa results for each keyword and fill the adjacent columns. For related workflows, see how to run deep research briefs for a topic list or enrich a prospect sheet with web-sourced facts.