The Scenario
You're a food blogger with 30 signature recipes managed in a Google Sheet. Each row has the recipe name, a comma-separated ingredient list, step-by-step instructions, and an image URL. Instacart lets you generate a hosted recipe page — with a shoppable ingredient list built in — for each one. Your readers have been asking for easier ways to get the groceries, and recipe pages are the answer.
Your editor mentioned it three times in last week's content review. You finally have a free hour to knock it out.
The bad version:
- Open the Instacart Developer Platform docs. Find the recipe page creation endpoint. Spend 20 minutes understanding the required payload structure.
- For recipe one: format the ingredient list from comma-separated into the expected array format, paste in the instructions block, add the image URL. Submit. Copy the returned page URL. Paste it into your sheet.
- Realize recipe three has instructions in a single run-on paragraph that the API might not handle well. Stop and clean it before proceeding.
Thirty recipes, each with its own quirks in how the data was entered, means 30 different small decisions — not one clean automated run.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the recipe data across all 30 rows, understands the column structure, and through its Instacart integration creates a hosted recipe page for each row and writes the returned URL back to the sheet.
For each row in this sheet (columns: Recipe Name, Ingredients, Instructions, Image URL), create a full Instacart recipe page and write the returned shareable URL into the last column.
What You Get
- A new column at the end of the sheet populated with a hosted Instacart recipe page URL for each of the 30 recipes.
- Each URL is a live, embeddable link — ready to drop into blog posts, email newsletters, or social bios.
- Rows where the image URL is invalid or the ingredient field is empty get a note instead of a broken page URL.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Ingredients are in a comma-separated string, not a structured list
The Instacart recipe page endpoint expects ingredients in a specific format, but your sheet has them as one long comma-separated string per row.
For each recipe row, parse the comma-separated ingredient list in the Ingredients column into a structured format, then create the Instacart recipe page using the name, parsed ingredients, instructions, and image URL, and write the returned URL into the last column.
Some image URLs are broken or placeholder links
You know some of the image URLs in the sheet are either broken or still pointing to draft placeholder images.
For each recipe row, check whether the Image URL column contains a working image URL. If valid, use it when creating the Instacart recipe page. If the URL is empty or returns an error, create the recipe page without an image and note "no image" in the adjacent column. Write the page URL into the final column.
Instructions are in different formats across rows
Some rows have step-by-step instructions numbered. Others are written as a single paragraph. Others use bullet dashes.
For each recipe row, normalize the instructions column into a clean numbered step format before creating the Instacart recipe page. Use the normalized instructions when submitting to the API. Write the page URL into the last column.
Clean the data, create the pages, and build a shareable summary sheet in one pass
Your editor wants a separate tab with just the recipe names and their Instacart page URLs for the content calendar.
For each recipe row in this sheet, normalize the ingredient format and validate the image URL. Create an Instacart recipe page for each recipe. Write the page URL into the last column of this sheet. Then create a new tab called "Instacart Pages" with two columns: Recipe Name and Page URL — one row per recipe.
The cleanup, the API calls, and the summary handoff tab all happen in one ask.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your recipe database sheet with ingredients and instructions, then ask it to generate hosted Instacart recipe pages for every row. Also see: Generate Shoppable Instacart Links for Recipes and the Instacart integration overview.