The Scenario
It's 28 minutes before the email campaign goes out and you've just been handed a sheet with 150 blog post URLs that need to be shortened before the send. The campaign uses L2S links so the team can track clicks per send — your head of content set it up that way three campaigns ago and now it's standard. What nobody planned for was who actually does the shortening when there's a real deadline attached.
The bad version:
- Open L2S in a new tab, paste URL 1 from column A, copy the short link, paste it to column B, row 1
- Switch back to the sheet, copy URL 2, switch to L2S, paste, shorten, copy result, switch back, paste to row 2 — 148 more times
- Discover at row 47 that you accidentally shortened the same URL twice and now have two separate L2S links for that destination, splitting analytics between them
The comms team is waiting on you. The send has a hard window. There is exactly no time to manually work through 150 rows one at a time, and you already know from last quarter that it takes about 40 minutes if you don't make any mistakes.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Google Sheet. It reads the column of URLs you're looking at and talks to L2S on your behalf — no tab switching, no copy-paste loop, no lost progress.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and paste this:
For every non-empty URL in column A of the 'Campaign Links' sheet, shorten it using L2S and write the shortened URL to column B in the same row
What You Get
- Column B fills with L2S short links, one per row, aligned exactly with the source URL in column A
- Empty rows in column A are skipped — the corresponding cell in column B stays blank
- Any URL that L2S rejects (malformed, already at maximum shortens) surfaces as an error message in column B so you can spot it immediately
- The operation runs as a single batch call, so there's no risk of accidentally creating duplicate short links for the same URL
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The URLs are scattered across two columns and some are already shortened
In the 'Campaign Links' sheet, combine the URLs from columns A and C into a single de-duplicated list — skip any cell that already contains an l2s.io domain — then shorten the remaining URLs using L2S and write the results to column E
Some cells have tracking parameters appended and you need clean base URLs shortened
For each URL in column A of 'Campaign Links', strip everything after the '?' before shortening, then shorten using L2S and write the short link to column B and the cleaned base URL to column C
The URLs are spread across three tabs and you need all results in one place
Collect all non-empty URLs from column A of the 'Blog Posts', 'Landing Pages', and 'Social Profiles' sheets, shorten each using L2S, and write the results to a new 'All Short Links' sheet with columns: original_url, short_url, source_tab
Full cleanup and send-prep in one shot
In 'Campaign Links', remove any rows where column A is empty or already contains an l2s.io URL, shorten the remaining URLs using L2S, write the short link to column B, then sort the sheet by the category in column C — leave a count of total links shortened in cell E1
One prompt handles the filter, the shortening, the writeback, and the sort. No intermediate steps.
Try It
Open any Google Sheet with a column of raw campaign URLs and get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI — ask it to shorten the batch and write the L2S links back before your next send goes out. For more on working with link data, see the L2S link inventory audit or the L2S hub overview.