The Scenario
An IP analyst received a competitor patent landscape assignment on Monday. Forty-five patent numbers are in column A. The deliverable is a structured summary — title, inventors, current assignee, filing date, and citation count — formatted for a legal team briefing on Friday. It is Tuesday morning.
The bad version:
- Open Google Patents, search patent ID 1, find the title, scroll to the inventors section, copy the names, find the current assignee (which may differ from the original applicant if the patent was transferred), note the filing date and citation count
- Repeat for patent ID 2, discovering that Google Patents' citation count is labeled differently on patents with many forward citations vs. few — so your column is not capturing a consistent metric
- Work through 20 patents across Tuesday, with 25 remaining for Wednesday, knowing you promised a complete sheet by Friday morning and you are already behind
A patent landscape briefing built on half the data is not a briefing — it is a starting point that requires someone else to finish the work.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the patent ID list in column A, calls SerpApi's Google Patents endpoint for each one, and writes the structured patent data back — all 45 rows, with consistent field extraction. One prompt.
For each patent ID in column A, fetch the patent details from Google Patents via SerpApi and fill in the title, inventors, assignee, filing date, and citation count into columns B through F
What You Get
- Column B receives the patent title
- Column C receives the inventor list
- Column D receives the current assignee name
- Column E receives the filing date
- Column F receives the forward citation count
- Patent IDs that return no result get a note in column G rather than an empty row that reads as a data gap
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Patent IDs in column A include formatting variations (spaces, dashes)
Normalize each patent ID in column A by removing spaces and standardizing format before searching Google Patents via SerpApi, then write the title, inventors, assignee, filing date, and citation count into columns B through F
You also want abstract summary and legal status
For each patent ID in column A, fetch Google Patents via SerpApi and write the abstract summary, current legal status, and primary inventor into columns B, C, and D
You want to flag patents that have been transferred (assignee differs from applicant)
For each patent ID in column A, fetch the patent via SerpApi and write the original applicant in column B, the current assignee in column C, and flag in column D any row where the two differ as "transferred"
Full landscape pull with citation outlier flag in one prompt
For each patent ID in column A, fetch patent details via SerpApi and write the title, inventors, assignee, filing date, and citation count into columns B through F; calculate the average citation count across all patents in column G (for row 2), and flag in column H any patent with citations more than twice the average as a "high-influence" patent
Influence scoring and data collection in one pass.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your patent tracking sheet before the legal briefing deadline, then ask SheetXAI to pull Google Patents data for every patent ID. Also see the spoke on pulling Google Scholar citations for literature research, or the hub overview of all SerpApi workflows.