The Scenario
You are a head of SEO and your board presentation is two weeks away. The ask is a full competitive backlink benchmark: your site against five competitors, covering total referring domains, domain authority score, dofollow versus nofollow ratio, and the top 10 anchor texts per domain.
You have all six domains in a Google Sheet. You have never had to do this at scale before.
The bad version of this project:
- You open Semrush and pull the backlink overview for Domain 1
- You screenshot the numbers, open the sheet, and type them in by hand
- You pull the anchor text report for Domain 1 and start copying the top 10 anchors
- You realize Semrush's anchor text export is paginated and you cannot get all 10 without scrolling
- You repeat this for five more domains
- By Domain 4 you have a typo in the authority score and do not know which one
- The board deck goes out with wrong numbers and you find out during the Q&A.
The fast version is one prompt and a clean sheet.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI reads the domain list and pulls backlink overview data and anchor text distributions from Semrush for each domain, writing everything into structured tabs.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
For each domain in column A, fetch the Semrush backlinks overview and write total backlinks, referring domains, authority score, and dofollow percentage into columns B through E. Then for each domain, pull the top 20 anchor texts and their frequency from Semrush and write them as rows in a new Anchors sheet with a Domain column so I can compare link-building strategies across competitors.
SheetXAI populates the overview metrics in the main tab and builds the Anchors tab with 20 rows per domain, all labeled. The board summary writes itself.
What You Get
An enriched main tab with:
- Column B — Total Backlinks — raw link count
- Column C — Referring Domains — unique linking root domains
- Column D — Authority Score — Semrush 0–100 domain authority
- Column E — Dofollow % — percentage of links passing equity
Plus a separate Anchors tab with columns for Domain, AnchorText, and Frequency, 20 rows per domain.
The Anchors tab is where the real competitive intelligence lives. If a competitor's top anchor is your brand name with "vs," they are running a comparison SEO strategy. If it is pure exact-match product terms, they are doubling down on non-brand. You can see the strategy in the data.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Backlink audits often need more nuance than a straight pull.
When you want to separate dofollow and nofollow anchor distributions
Your link-building team only cares about dofollow anchors. Mixing in nofollow anchor texts skews the picture.
For each domain in column A, pull the top 20 anchor texts from Semrush but filter to dofollow links only. Write them into the Anchors sheet with a Domain column and a LinkType column set to "Dofollow."
When some domains return far fewer than 20 anchors
A newer domain in your comparison set has fewer than 20 distinct anchors. You do not want blanks throwing off the averages.
Pull anchor texts for each domain in column A. For any domain with fewer than 20 distinct anchors, write all available anchors and note the actual count in a separate AnchorCount column in the main overview tab.
When you want to flag anchor texts that suggest toxic link patterns
Spammy anchors — random strings, non-English phrases, exact-match commercial terms from low-authority sites — are worth flagging separately.
After pulling anchor texts for all domains, scan the Anchors tab. Flag any anchor that appears to be a random string, contains non-Latin characters, or is a pure commercial exact-match phrase with no brand context. Write "Review" in a Flag column for those rows so the link audit team can investigate.
When the full benchmark needs authority scores, anchor distribution, and a competitor narrative in one pass
You want the data, the analysis, and a draft summary paragraph for the board deck, all in one operation.
For each domain in column A, fetch the Semrush backlinks overview and write total backlinks, referring domains, authority score, and dofollow percentage into columns B through E. Then pull top 20 anchors per domain into the Anchors sheet. Then in a new cell at the top of the main tab, write a 3-sentence summary comparing the six domains: which has the strongest link profile, which is growing fastest based on referring domain count, and which shows the riskiest anchor distribution.
The pattern: the data pull, the analysis, and the narrative all come from one prompt. The board deck section is ready without a separate writing pass.
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 benchmark. The Semrush integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For a related workflow, see how to export referring domains sorted by authority score or the Semrush in Google Sheets overview.