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Build a YouTube Competitor Video Research Sheet From Keywords in a Google Sheet

2026-05-14
5 min read

The Scenario

The content team at your B2B SaaS company just handed you a Google Sheet with 25 product-related keywords in column A. The ask: pull the top 5 YouTube results for each — video title, channel name, view count, and URL — so the team can identify which competitors are dominating video search before the next content planning cycle.

The planning meeting is in three days. Nobody has touched the sheet yet because the YouTube SERP pull was supposed to be "quick."

The bad version:

  • Search YouTube for keyword one, manually record five video titles, the channel name for each, view counts, and URLs into columns B through Q
  • Repeat for all 25 keywords, keeping count of which row maps to which result slot
  • Realize that YouTube doesn't display view counts in a consistent format and spend extra time normalizing "1.2M views" into a number

The content strategy deck needs competitor video data to make the case for where your team should invest. Showing up with a blank spreadsheet doesn't make that case.

The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI

SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Google Sheet. It reads your keyword list, understands what you want to build, and through its built-in Search API integration it queries YouTube for each keyword and writes the structured result data back into the sheet.

For each keyword in column A, search YouTube using Search API and write the top 5 video titles into columns B, F, J, N, R, the channel names into columns C, G, K, O, S, the view counts into columns D, H, L, P, T, and the video URLs into columns E, I, M, Q, U.

What You Get

  • 25 rows of YouTube SERP data with 5 results per keyword organized across title, channel, view count, and URL columns
  • View counts written as numbers or as-returned strings from the API so the data can be sorted and filtered immediately
  • Video URLs formatted as clickable links in the URL columns

What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready

Some keywords in column A are too broad and you want to narrow them with a qualifier before searching

For each keyword in column A, append the qualifier in cell B1 to the keyword before searching YouTube using Search API, then write the top 5 video titles, channel names, view counts, and URLs into columns C through R for each row.

You want to flag results where your company's own channel appears in the top 5

For each keyword in column A, search YouTube using Search API and write the top 5 video titles, channels, view counts, and URLs into columns B through Q, then mark column R with "own channel" if any of the top 5 results belong to the channel name in cell A1, otherwise leave it blank.

Your sheet has both a "Core Keywords" tab and a "Long-Tail Keywords" tab and you want YouTube data for both

Search YouTube using Search API for each keyword in column A of the "Core Keywords" tab, write the top 3 video titles, channel names, and URLs into columns B, C, and D of that tab, then do the same for all keywords in column A of the "Long-Tail Keywords" tab.

You want to pull YouTube results, flag which channels appear across multiple keywords, and output a ranked channel frequency table — all in one prompt

For each keyword in column A, search YouTube using Search API and write the top 5 video titles, channel names, view counts, and URLs into columns B through Q, then scan all the channel name results and create a new sheet tab called "Channel Frequency" that lists every channel that appeared in results for more than one keyword, sorted from most keyword appearances to fewest.

Combining the data pull with the channel analysis means you skip the pivot table step entirely.

Try It

Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your content keyword sheet, then ask it to pull YouTube SERP data for each keyword using Search API. If you're also tracking Google organic rankings for the same keywords, the bulk fetch SERP results spoke is the companion workflow.

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