How to Connect IQAir AirVisual to Google Sheets (4 Methods Compared)

The Problem With Getting Sheet Data In and Out of IQAir AirVisual

You have a Google Sheet full of city names, GPS coordinates, or facility locations. You need current AQI readings, pollution breakdowns, and weather conditions pulled from IQAir AirVisual and landed in the right columns — before a client call, a compliance deadline, or a team review that's happening in a few hours.

IQAir AirVisual is good at delivering real-time and historical air quality data for thousands of cities worldwide. But bridging that data into your spreadsheet requires you to either work through their API or export and reformat by hand — and neither option scales once you have more than a handful of locations.

Below are the four common ways teams handle this. Only the last one scales.

Method 1: Manual Copy-Paste

The default workflow. You open IQAir's web interface, search each city one at a time, read the AQI off the screen, and type it into your sheet. For a list of ten cities this is annoying but survivable.

For sixty cities it becomes an hour of copy-paste with no audit trail and no way to refresh. And AQI is not static — the moment you finish entering city 60, city 1 has already updated. Your sheet is a snapshot of different moments in time, not a coherent dataset.

If this is something you do quarterly for a single report, fine. If it recurs, or if the list grows, the cumulative grind of re-pulling the same data week after week has a way of quietly consuming whole afternoons.

Method 2: Zapier or Make

Both platforms have IQAir connectors. You can wire up a trigger on a Google Sheet change or a time schedule, call the AirVisual API for each row, and write the result back.

Before going further — do you know what a webhook trigger looks like? An API connector? Field mapping? Rate-limit handling for a hundred-city list? If those phrases feel unfamiliar, this path will take longer than expected. You are better off reading Method 3 or 4 before committing to this one.

If you do have the technical background: the flow works. The limit is that automations like these fire row by row. A hundred cities means a hundred separate API calls, a hundred trigger events, and a task log that gets very hard to read when one row comes back empty and Zapier quietly skips it.

You probably just need the AQI data for your location list. You probably have no idea why you would need to set up a trigger on a spreadsheet change and map five output fields one at a time. So this ends up going to whoever on your team knows how to build integrations, and now you are in Slack waiting for them to prioritize it.

Chaining steps — pulling the data, filtering by threshold, writing back a flag column — adds cost at each node and creates debugging surface area that nobody volunteers to own.

Method 3: The Previous Generation — Connector Add-Ons

Until recently, the most reliable option for repeatable spreadsheet-to-API workflows was a category of add-ons that let you configure column mappings, save templates, and run them on a schedule. You picked your input range, mapped your output fields, saved the config, and hit run.

That was a genuine step forward from copy-paste. The output was consistent, configs were reusable, and the team did not have to reformat the data every cycle.

But you still had to define the mapping for every field. You still had to decide which columns held city, state, and country. You still had to configure what happened when a row came back with missing data. You still had to rebuild the template any time your sheet structure changed. The tool moved the data — but the thinking was entirely on you.

This is the previous generation. It solved the repetition problem but not the complexity problem.

The Easy Way: Using SheetXAI in Google Sheets

There is a different approach. SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the sheet, understands what you are looking at, and through its built-in IQAir AirVisual integration it can pull air quality, weather, and pollution data for your location list without any mapping configuration.

Example 1: Bulk AQI pull for a city list

For each city/state/country in columns A, B, C of my Cities sheet, fetch the current air quality from IQAir and write the US AQI, PM2.5 concentration, main pollutant, and temperature into columns D, E, F, G.

SheetXAI reads the city, state, and country from each row, calls IQAir for each location, and writes the four fields back into the sheet. Rows with no matching IQAir location come back flagged rather than silently blank.

Example 2: Ranked air quality comparison

Fetch current AQI data for all 20 cities in my Office Locations sheet, then sort them by AQI from lowest to highest and write the ranked list with city name, country, and AQI into a new tab called Air Quality Ranking.

The pattern: instead of pulling the data and then sorting it separately, you ask for both in one prompt. SheetXAI handles the conditional logic inline.

Try It

Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Google Sheet with a city or location list, then ask it to pull the AQI data you need. The IQAir AirVisual integration is included in every SheetXAI plan.