The Scenario
You manage Instagram for several client accounts at a growth agency. Your team maintains a master hashtag library in a Google Sheet — 200 hashtags across different niches, built up over eighteen months — that gets pulled into every new campaign brief.
Last week, a client's post on a hashtag you'd been using for months got shadow-restricted. You looked it up and it had been banned. Nobody on the team knew.
Now the head of strategy wants an audit of the entire library before the next campaign cycle starts. The campaign launches in six days.
The bad version:
- Open Instagram, search each hashtag manually, look for the "Recent posts hidden" warning, note the result in the sheet. Two hundred hashtags. Probably three hours of work, with your thumbs.
- Run a spot-check on the fifty hashtags used most frequently and hope the banned ones aren't in the other 150.
- Ask the client to let you know if they notice any reach issues, and treat the audit as something you'll get to next quarter.
The campaign brief goes out in two days. Nobody is getting to this "next quarter." And if another client post gets dinged by a hashtag you knew was in the library, that's a different kind of conversation.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the hashtag library and, through its built-in RiteKit integration, calls the banned-hashtag check for each one and writes the results into the columns you specify.
For each hashtag in column A of the "Hashtag Library" sheet, call RiteKit to check if it is banned on Instagram and write BANNED or SAFE into column B. For rows where the result is BANNED, write the date of the check in column C.
What You Get
- Column B: BANNED or SAFE for every hashtag in column A
- Column C: Today's date on any banned-tag row, so you know when the check was run
- Every row in column A gets a result — 200 checks, no manual lookup
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The hashtags in column A include the # symbol on some rows and not others
Before calling RiteKit, normalize column A: strip the # prefix from any hashtag that has one. Then run the banned-hashtag check for each normalized hashtag and write BANNED or SAFE to column B. Write the normalized hashtag (without #) back to column A.
The library is organized by niche across multiple sheets — "Beauty", "Fitness", "Tech" — and I need all three audited
For each hashtag in column A of the "Beauty" tab, call RiteKit's banned-hashtag check and write BANNED or SAFE to column B. Repeat for the "Fitness" and "Tech" tabs. After all three are checked, create a new tab called "Audit Summary" listing only the BANNED hashtags from all three sheets, with the source tab name in column B.
Some hashtags appear in multiple sheets and I don't want to check the same one twice
Collect all hashtags from column A across the "Beauty", "Fitness", and "Tech" tabs into a deduplicated list. Call RiteKit's banned-hashtag check for each unique hashtag once. Then write the result back to column B on every tab where that hashtag appears. Add a note in column C on any row where the hashtag appeared in more than one tab.
I want to audit the library, remove the banned hashtags, and generate a clean export in one pass
For each hashtag in column A, call RiteKit's banned-hashtag check and write BANNED or SAFE to column B. After all checks are complete, create a new tab called "Clean Library" that contains only the rows where column B is SAFE. Format the clean library with just the hashtags in column A, no header row, ready to copy into a campaign brief.
Audit, filter, and export — described once, handled in one pass.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your hashtag library Google Sheet, then ask it to run a RiteKit banned-hashtag audit across every row before your next campaign cycle. You might also want to generate fresh hashtag suggestions for your upcoming posts, or return to the RiteKit + Google Sheets overview.