The Scenario
You've been asked to put together a competitive landscape brief covering 60 domains — a mix of direct competitors, adjacent tools, and a few companies you've heard mentioned in sales calls. Someone wants to know which ones are long-established versus recently launched, who registered them, and whether any share a registrar that might indicate a common ownership structure. The data doesn't exist anywhere in the company. You're going to have to look it up.
The usual move here is to open WHOIS lookup sites one at a time, read the registrar and creation date, and paste each into a row. Sixty domains. Sixty lookups. Sixty copy-pastes across four columns.
- Open a WHOIS tool, type the first domain, locate the registrar field buried in a wall of text, copy it into column B
- Find the creation date — sometimes labeled "Created", sometimes "Registration Date", sometimes something else entirely depending on the registrar — and paste it into column C
- Realize the expiration date format is different across TLDs and you'll need to normalize it later
- Move to the next domain and repeat, knowing you've got 59 more to go
You're supposed to be building competitive strategy, not transcribing WHOIS records. The brief is due Friday and this is Monday.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the domain list in column A and uses IP2Location.io's WHOIS API to retrieve registration metadata for each one — registrar, creation date, expiration date, registrant organization — writing the results back without you touching a WHOIS tool.
For each domain in column A, use IP2Location.io's WHOIS API to fetch registrar, creation date, expiration date, and registrant organization, then write results to columns B through E.
What You Get
- Column B: registrar name (e.g., "GoDaddy.com, LLC", "Namecheap, Inc.")
- Column C: creation date in normalized format
- Column D: expiration date in normalized format
- Column E: registrant organization name, where publicly available (privacy-protected domains return a placeholder)
- Any domain that returns no WHOIS data is flagged in the chat, not silently left blank
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You need to sort by domain age and calculate how many years each has been registered
Sort the sheet by creation date in column C oldest-first to identify the most established competitors, then add column F showing the domain age in years calculated from today's date.
Some domains in your list include subdomains or paths — you want the root domain only
For each entry in column A, extract the root domain (strip subdomains and paths), then use IP2Location.io's WHOIS API to look up registrar, creation date, expiration date, and registrant org and write results to columns B through E.
You want to flag recently registered domains as higher risk
After fetching WHOIS data for all domains in column A and writing to columns B through E, add column F: write 'RECENT' if the creation date in column C is within the last 2 years, and 'ESTABLISHED' otherwise.
Full WHOIS enrichment, age calculation, risk flag, and registrar frequency count in one pass
For each domain in column A, use IP2Location.io's WHOIS API to fetch registrar, creation date, expiration date, and registrant org into columns B through E. Add column F with domain age in years. Add column G: 'RECENT' if under 2 years old, 'ESTABLISHED' otherwise. Then create a new sheet called 'Registrar Frequency' counting how many domains use each registrar, sorted descending.
One instruction covers the lookup, the calculated field, the flag, and the summary pivot — you don't have to chain them as separate steps.
Try It
If you have a list of competitor or vendor domains waiting in column A of a Google Sheet, Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and ask it to pull WHOIS data for each one using IP2Location.io. To map which IPs those domains might share, see the hosted-domain discovery guide or the full hub overview.