The Scenario
You are an SEO director at a SaaS company. The VP of Marketing asked you in last week's all-hands to show link-building momentum versus two competitors over the past year. Not a snapshot — a trend line showing how referring domains have grown month by month for all three sites.
You have all three domains in a Google Sheet. The chart needs to be ready for the next board update in ten days.
The bad version of this project:
- You open Semrush and look for historical backlink data for Domain 1
- You find it under Backlink Analytics > Trend but it only shows a chart, not a table
- You hover over each month's data point and write down the number manually
- You do this for 12 months, then for Domain 2, then Domain 3
- After 90 minutes you have a table full of numbers you manually transcribed from chart tooltips
- You discover two of the months for Domain 2 look wrong but you cannot tell if you misread the chart
- You present a trend chart you cannot fully defend in the board meeting.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI reads the domain list and pulls the historical backlink time-series data from Semrush for each domain, writing month-by-month rows into a structured sheet.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
For each domain in column A, fetch the Semrush historical backlink data for the past 12 months and write month, total backlinks, and referring domain count as rows in a new History sheet. Include a Domain column so I can filter and build a chart comparing all three.
SheetXAI pulls 12 months of data per domain and writes 36 rows into the History tab, all labeled. A line chart comparing link velocity across all three domains is two clicks away.
What You Get
A History tab with:
- Column A — Domain — which domain each row belongs to
- Column B — Month — formatted as YYYY-MM for clean charting
- Column C — TotalBacklinks — raw backlink count that month
- Column D — ReferringDomains — unique linking root domains that month
Filter by Domain, then plot ReferringDomains over Month. Three trend lines, one chart, board-ready in under five minutes.
The referring domain trend is the number that matters. Total backlinks can spike from a single site linking many pages. Referring domains is the real growth signal.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Historical trend reports need adjustment when the data has gaps or you need more depth.
When Semrush returns monthly data with irregular date formatting
One domain's historical data comes back with dates as "Apr 2025" and another as "2025-04." Your chart axis breaks.
For each domain in column A, fetch the 12-month historical backlink data from Semrush. Normalize all date values to YYYY-MM format before writing into the History tab. Write Domain, Month, TotalBacklinks, and ReferringDomains as columns.
When you want to show month-over-month growth rate instead of raw numbers
The VP wants to see the velocity, not the absolute count. Which months had the biggest jumps.
After building the History tab with raw data, add a MoMGrowth column showing the month-over-month percentage change in referring domains for each domain. Flag any month where the growth rate exceeded 15% by writing "Spike" in a separate column.
When you only want the last 6 months because the earlier data is not relevant
The company pivoted its link-building strategy 6 months ago. Earlier data would make the trend look flat.
For each domain in column A, fetch the Semrush historical backlink data for the past 6 months only and write Month, TotalBacklinks, and ReferringDomains into the History tab with a Domain column.
When the full trend analysis needs data, a growth summary, and a chart-ready structure in one pass
The board deck needs numbers, a narrative, and a chart they can screenshot.
For each domain in column A, fetch the 12-month historical backlink data from Semrush and write Domain, Month, TotalBacklinks, and ReferringDomains into the History tab. Add a MoMGrowth column for referring domains. Then in a Summary tab, write one sentence per domain describing overall referring domain growth over the year: net new referring domains, peak growth month, and whether the trend is accelerating or slowing.
The pattern: the data pull, the growth calculation, and the narrative for the board all come from one prompt.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and put your domain and competitor domains in column A, then ask it to build the backlink history trend. The Semrush integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For a related workflow, see how to run a domain vs. domain keyword gap analysis or the Semrush in Google Sheets overview.