The Scenario
You run competitive intelligence for a B2B SaaS company, and last Thursday your VP of Marketing forwarded you a press item about a competitor's new product launch — with "how much coverage did this get?" in the subject line.
You have a Google Sheet you use for tracking competitor activity. Column A has the competitor names. But the coverage data is nowhere in it.
The bad version:
- Open News API in the browser, manually construct a URL with the competitor name and a date filter, and call the endpoint
- Copy the JSON response into a text editor, scan through article objects, and paste title, source, URL, and date into the sheet row by row
- Repeat for each competitor name in column A, keeping track of which rows belong to which query
A VP question about last week's coverage is not a two-hour research task. The answer should take two minutes.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the sheet, connects to News API, and writes results directly into the cells you point it at — no endpoint construction, no JSON parsing.
Search News API for all articles mentioning the competitor name in cell A2 published in the last 7 days and write each article's title, source name, URL, and published date into columns B, C, D, and E starting at row 2
What You Get
- Column B: article headline, exactly as returned by News API
- Column C: source name (e.g. "TechCrunch", "Forbes")
- Column D: direct article URL
- Column E: published date in YYYY-MM-DD format
- Articles sorted newest first, with a row written per result up to the API page limit
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The competitor name in column A has special characters or spaces
Search News API for articles mentioning the exact phrase in cell A2 using quotes to enforce phrase matching, and write title, source, URL, and published date into columns B through E
You want results from multiple competitors in one pass
For each competitor name in column A rows 2 through 10, search News API for articles from the last 7 days and write the most recent 5 results per competitor into a flat list starting in Sheet2 column A, with competitor name in column A, title in B, source in C, and URL in D
Some source names come back inconsistently formatted
Search News API for articles mentioning the value in cell A2, write the raw results into Sheet1 columns B through E, then normalize the source names in column C to title case
Pull coverage, count it, and flag gaps in one shot
Search News API for each competitor in column A rows 2 through 8, write the total article count per competitor into column B, the most recent headline into column C, and flag any competitor with fewer than 3 articles in the last 7 days with "LOW" in column D
The pattern here is: gather, count, and evaluate in a single instruction rather than running three separate queries.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the Google Sheet where you track competitors, then ask it to pull last week's coverage from News API for each name in your list. For related tasks, see how to monitor specific outlets for brand mentions or run keyword content gap research. Full overview: News API + Google Sheets.