The Scenario
You are an international SEO strategist at an agency with four client websites: a UK e-commerce brand, a US SaaS company, an Australian services firm, and a German tech startup. Each client wants to understand where their referring domains come from by country, so you can all make intelligent decisions about international link-building targets.
You have all four domains in a Google Sheet. The strategy presentations are in two weeks.
The bad version of this project:
- You open Semrush and pull the referring domains by country report for Client 1
- The report shows 40+ countries, you export it to CSV
- You paste it into a tab, label it Client 1
- You repeat for three more clients
- You now have four tabs with different sort orders and different country code formats
- You realize Semrush returns two-letter country codes for some clients and full names for others depending on which export format you used
- You spend Friday afternoon normalizing country names across four tabs before you can build any comparison.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI reads the domain list and pulls the referring domains by country data from Semrush for each domain, assembling it all into one structured sheet with consistent formatting.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
For each domain in column A, fetch the Semrush referring domains by country report and write each country code and referring domain count as rows in a new GeoBacklinks sheet. Include a Domain column and expand all country codes to full country names.
SheetXAI pulls the geographic distribution for all four domains, normalizes the country names, and writes a single GeoBacklinks tab with everything labeled.
What You Get
A GeoBacklinks tab with:
- Column A — Domain — which client this row belongs to
- Column B — Country — full country name (not a two-letter code)
- Column C — ReferringDomains — number of unique linking domains from that country
Filter by Domain, then sort by ReferringDomains descending. The top countries for each client reveal where their link profile is anchored and where the gaps are. A UK brand with 80% of referring domains from the US has a geographic mismatch problem. A German startup with almost no US referring domains has an English-language link-building opportunity.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Geographic backlink reports need adjustment when clients have specific targeting requirements.
When you want to compare each client's top 5 countries side by side
A flat list of all countries per domain is hard to compare. You want a pivot view showing the top 5 countries for each client in adjacent columns.
After building the GeoBacklinks tab, create a pivot-style summary in a new tab called GeoSummary. For each domain in column A, show the top 5 countries by referring domain count as columns. Use countries as rows and domains as columns, showing the referring domain count at each intersection.
When a client has a specific target market and you want to measure penetration
Your UK e-commerce client targets English-speaking markets: UK, US, Australia, Canada, Ireland. They want to know what percentage of their link profile comes from those five markets.
For the domain in A1, fetch the Semrush referring domains by country report. Calculate the percentage of total referring domains that come from UK, US, AU, CA, and IE combined. Write this as a single "Target Market Coverage" percentage at the top of the GeoBacklinks tab. Then write the full country breakdown below.
When you want to flag domains with a high concentration of low-value country link profiles
Referring domains from certain markets have historically been associated with lower-quality link building. You want to flag any client with more than 15% of their referring domains from those markets.
After building the GeoBacklinks tab, check if any domain has more than 15% of its referring domains from countries in this list: [specific countries]. If so, write a flag in a separate RiskFlags tab noting the domain and the percentage. Leave unflagged domains out of the RiskFlags tab.
When the full geo-diversity audit needs distribution data, a coverage score, and a strategic recommendation in one pass
The client presentation needs data and a point of view.
For each domain in column A, fetch the Semrush referring domains by country report and write into the GeoBacklinks tab with Domain, Country, and ReferringDomains columns. Then in a GeoStrategy tab, write a 2-sentence recommendation for each client: which geographic market is underrepresented given their target audience, and what type of outreach would address the gap fastest.
The pattern: the data pull, the coverage analysis, and the strategic recommendation all come from one prompt.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and put your client domains in column A, then ask it to build the geographic backlink distribution. The Semrush integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For more Semrush workflows, see how to pull a 12-month backlink history trend or the Semrush in Google Sheets overview.