The Scenario
An SEO link-builder inherited a list of 50 niche topics from a colleague who left the team. The goal is to find high-quality community posts in each topic area — Reddit threads, Quora answers, Stack Exchange discussions — that are worth citing or engaging with as part of an outreach campaign. The campaign brief is due next Monday.
The bad version:
- Search topic 1 in Google with a "site:reddit.com" filter, browse the results, copy the thread title, subreddit, date, and URL into four columns
- Switch to a general Google search to catch non-Reddit forum results for the same topic, copy those into additional columns, now with six to eight columns of inconsistent data depending on how many results each query returned
- Work through 12 topics across the morning before hitting the cognitive limit of jumping between search tabs, copy-pasting URLs, and keeping the columns aligned
A link outreach campaign built on a partial forum map is a campaign that leaves the best opportunities on the table.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the topic list in column A, calls SerpApi's Google Forums endpoint for each one, and writes the forum thread data back — all 50 rows. One prompt.
For each topic in column A, search Google Forums via SerpApi and paste the top 5 thread titles, forum names, dates, and URLs into the next 20 columns
What You Get
- For each of the top 5 forum results: thread title, forum name (subreddit, Quora topic, Stack Exchange board), date, and URL each land in their own column
- Topics with fewer than 5 forum results leave the later column groups blank
- Topics that return no forum results at all get a note in the first data column rather than an empty row
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Topics in column A are too broad and return off-topic forum threads
For each topic in column A, search Google Forums via SerpApi with the additional qualifier "question OR discussion OR help" appended, and write the top 5 thread titles, forum names, and URLs into the next 15 columns
You only want Reddit results, not all forums
For each topic in column A, search Google Forums via SerpApi filtered to site:reddit.com and write the top 5 thread titles, subreddit names, and URLs into the next 15 columns
You want threads with high engagement signals
For each topic in column A, search Google Forums via SerpApi, retrieve the top 5 results with thread title, forum name, and reply/answer count, and write them into the next 15 columns; flag in the last column any thread with more than 50 replies as "high engagement"
Full forum pull, dedup, and outreach priority in one prompt
Search Google Forums via SerpApi for each topic in column A, write the top 3 thread titles and URLs into columns B through G, check for duplicate URLs across all rows and mark them in column H, and flag in column I any thread from a domain that also appears in three or more other topic rows as a "recurring community source"
Community mapping and deduplication in one pass.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your link outreach topic sheet, then ask SheetXAI to pull Google Forums results for every niche. Also see the spoke on pulling Google Scholar citations for content credibility, or the hub overview of all SerpApi workflows.