The Scenario
Your equity research director dropped 25 tickers into a shared sheet on Monday and asked for a ratings summary by end of day Wednesday — Strong Buy through Strong Sell distributions, mean target price, everything from Zacks. It's Tuesday afternoon and the sheet is still empty.
The bad version:
- Open the Nasdaq Data Link documentation to find the right Zacks endpoint and datatable filter syntax.
- Write a test query for the first ticker, figure out what the response fields are named, realize the column you want is called
rating_avgnotmean_rating. - Build a script to loop through 25 tickers, handle rate limits, and paste results into the sheet row by row — and find out at ticker 18 that one of the symbols isn't covered by Zacks, which breaks the loop.
The director doesn't need a data engineering project. You need a formatted summary in a sheet by tomorrow morning.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Google Sheet that reads your watchlist and calls Nasdaq Data Link on your behalf. No endpoint syntax to look up, no loop to write, no column name mismatches to debug.
For every ticker in column A, retrieve analyst ratings from Nasdaq Data Link (Zacks) and write the Strong Buy count, Buy count, Hold count, Sell count, Strong Sell count, mean rating score, and mean target price into columns B through H
What You Get
- Columns B–H populated with a header row on row 1: Strong Buy, Buy, Hold, Sell, Strong Sell, Mean Rating, Mean Target Price
- One row per ticker, matching the order of your watchlist
- Tickers with no Zacks coverage get a "No coverage" note in column B rather than an empty row that looks like the call succeeded
- Mean rating score written as a decimal (e.g. 2.3 on a 1–5 scale); target price in USD
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some tickers have changed their symbols since the watchlist was built
Ticker renames happen. You want the current Zacks data but the symbols in column A are a mix of old and new.
For each ticker in column A, check Nasdaq Data Link Zacks for analyst ratings — if a ticker returns no result, check column B for an alternate symbol and retry with that; write Strong Buy, Buy, Hold, Sell, Strong Sell, Mean Rating, Mean Target Price into columns C through I
You need the number of analysts covering each stock alongside the ratings
Your director also wants analyst count so she can weight by coverage depth.
For every ticker in column A, retrieve Zacks analyst ratings from Nasdaq Data Link and write Strong Buy count, Buy count, Hold count, Sell count, Strong Sell count, mean rating score, mean target price, and total analyst count into columns B through I
You want ratings only for the stocks where you hold a position, filtered by a flag column
Column B has a "Hold" or "Watch" flag. You only want ratings pulled for the "Hold" tickers.
For all tickers in column A where column B says "Hold", retrieve analyst ratings from Nasdaq Data Link Zacks and write Strong Buy count, Buy count, Hold count, Sell count, Strong Sell count, mean rating score, and mean target price into columns C through I — leave rows where column B is "Watch" blank
You want ratings, target prices, and a momentum flag calculated in one shot
For every ticker in column A, pull Zacks analyst ratings from Nasdaq — write Strong Buy count, Buy count, Hold count, Sell count, Strong Sell count, mean rating, and mean target price into columns B through H — then add a column I that says "Bullish" if Strong Buy count exceeds Sell + Strong Sell combined, "Bearish" if the reverse, and "Neutral" otherwise
The pattern is to fetch and classify in one prompt, so you don't have to apply a formula layer after the data lands.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Google Sheet with a watchlist of stock tickers, then ask it to pull the full Zacks ratings distribution and mean target price for every position. You can also look at the spoke on tracking rating changes over time or the Nasdaq overview.