The Scenario
The product relaunch is in four days. The web team overhauled the landing pages — new URLs, new structure, old slugs are going away. Someone from campaigns just messaged you a Google Sheet with 30 rows: column A has Lob link IDs, column B has the new destination URLs.
Every one of those short links is already printed on mailers that went out last quarter. The QR codes still work. The short links still resolve. But they're about to point to 404 pages unless someone updates them in Lob before launch day.
You're the one with Lob access.
The bad version:
- Open Lob's dashboard, search for link ID one, click into the edit view, paste the new destination URL, save
- Repeat for each of the thirty links
- Realize the dashboard search doesn't surface links by ID directly — you have to scroll to find them
- Finish row 22, get pulled into a relaunch standup, come back and lose track of which rows you've already updated
Missing even one link means a broken QR code in the field for however long it takes someone to notice and report it. With printed mail already in homes, you don't get a recall.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the link ID and destination columns, calls Lob's link-update API for each row, and writes the confirmation status back — in one pass.
For each row in my sheet with a Lob link ID in column A and a new destination URL in column B, update the link in Lob and write 'Updated' or the error message into column C.
What You Get
- Column C filled with 'Updated' for every successfully updated row
- Any row where Lob returned an error written with the error message in column C — not silently skipped
- Cell E1 updated with a count of successful updates (if requested in the prompt)
- The original link IDs and new URLs in columns A and B unchanged
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some new destination URLs in column B still have the old path structure and need a prefix swap
Before updating, replace the URL prefix "https://old.example.com" with "https://new.example.com" in all column B values, then update each Lob short link in column A to point to the corrected URL in column B and write 'Updated' or the error into column C.
A few rows in column A have duplicate link IDs — only update each unique ID once
Deduplicate rows in column A so each link ID appears only once, keeping the row with the most recently formatted URL in column B, then update each unique Lob link to the destination in column B and write the result to column C.
I need to verify all new destination URLs return a 200 before updating Lob
Check that each URL in column B returns an HTTP 200 status. Write the status code into column D. For rows where column D is 200, update the corresponding Lob link in column A and write 'Updated' into column C. For rows with non-200 status, write 'Skipped — page not live' into column C.
After updating, I want a full confirmation report written to a separate tab
Update all Lob short links in column A to point to the new destination URLs in column B. Write 'Updated' or the error into column C. Then create a tab called 'Relaunch Audit' and write a summary showing: total links updated, total errors, and the timestamp of when the batch completed.
Cleanup, validation, and the update action — one prompt handles all of it.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the sheet your web team handed you with link IDs and new destination URLs, then ask it to bulk-update every Lob short link before the relaunch goes live. See also the spoke on auditing your Lob short link inventory and the full Lob integration overview.