The Scenario
You are a retail expansion analyst. It is Wednesday and the site selection committee meets Friday. You have 30 candidate store locations in a Google Sheet, lat/lng in columns A and B. The committee wants to know, for each site, how many competitor grocery stores are within a 1-mile radius.
Your current approach is opening a mapping app, dropping a pin on each location, zooming in, and manually counting. At 30 locations, that is four hours of counting that nobody should be paid to do.
The bad version of Wednesday:
- You open the mapping app and zoom into site 1
- You count four grocery stores, write "4" in column C
- Site 7 has a cluster that is hard to count at this zoom level
- You zoom in, lose track of the boundary, and guess
- By Friday the committee has numbers for 18 of 30 sites, three of which are guesses.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your spreadsheet that reads your candidate locations and calls HERE Browse for each one, writing POI counts back into the sheet.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
For each lat/lng pair in columns A and B, use HERE Browse to find all grocery store POIs within 1,600 meters (approximately 1 mile) and write the count to column C and the name of the closest competitor to column D.
SheetXAI reads all 30 coordinate pairs, calls HERE Browse for each, counts the results within the radius, and writes count and closest name back. All 30 sites, consistent methodology, no eyeballing.
What You Get
A site analysis enriched with competitive density data:
- Column C — competitor grocery store count within 1 mile for each site
- Column D — name of the closest competitor location
Sort column C ascending and the lowest-competition sites surface immediately. The committee can filter to sites with fewer than three competitors and cross-reference with the lease-cost data in column E.
Change the radius or the POI category in a follow-up prompt, no reconfiguration needed.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Site lists come with missing coordinates, mixed categories, and stakeholder-specific cut-offs. SheetXAI handles the variation inline.
When you need multiple POI categories in separate columns
The committee wants competitor grocery counts, but also wants nearby coffee shops as a footfall signal.
For each lat/lng pair in columns A and B, use HERE Browse to count grocery store POIs within 1,600 meters and write the count to column C. Also count coffee shop POIs within 500 meters and write that count to column D.
When some rows have addresses instead of coordinates
Twenty of your 30 sites have lat/lng but 10 only have a street address in column C.
For rows where columns A and B are blank, geocode the address in column C using HERE and write lat/lng to columns A and B. Then for all 30 rows, use HERE Browse to count grocery store POIs within 1,600 meters and write the count to column D and the closest competitor name to column E.
When you want to flag sites that cross a competitor density threshold
The committee wants to instantly see which sites have too many competitors to be viable.
For each lat/lng pair in columns A and B, use HERE Browse to count grocery store POIs within 1,600 meters and write the count to column C. Add a flag in column D: write "High Competition" if column C is greater than 4, otherwise write "Viable".
When you need POI counts, competitor names, and a ranked shortlist in one pass
The VP wants the raw counts, the closest competitor name, and a top 10 ranked by lowest competition.
For each of the 30 lat/lng pairs in columns A and B, use HERE Browse to find grocery store POIs within 1,600 meters. Write count to column C and closest competitor name to column D. Then create a new tab called "Top 10 Sites" and write the 10 rows with the lowest count in column C, sorted ascending, with all original columns included.
The pattern: data pull, enrichment, and output table in one prompt, so you walk into Friday's meeting with a ranked shortlist, not a raw list.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any sheet with location coordinates, then ask it to find nearby POIs using HERE Browse. The HERE integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. See also how to generate drive-time catchment polygons or the HERE in Google Sheets overview.