The Scenario
Your brand manager sent a Slack message at 8:47 AM: "Can you put together a news snapshot for the eighty competitor brands we're tracking? I need to see what's being covered and what their top image result looks like — the deck goes to the CMO at 2."
It's 9:15. You're a marketing ops manager and you know exactly what this ask involves. Eighty Google News lookups, eighty image searches, six columns of data per brand, filled into a sheet that doesn't exist yet. The previous person who did this job built a spreadsheet template and then left the company three months ago.
The bad version:
- Search Google News for brand one, copy the top three article titles, sources, and dates into the sheet
- Switch to Google Images, search for brand one, copy the top image URL
- Repeat eighty times, hoping the formatting stays consistent and you don't accidentally paste a Bloomberg article into the Salesforce row
You have four hours. The manual version takes six.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Google Sheet. It reads the brand list, calls SerpHouse for Google News and image results for each brand, and writes the headlines, sources, dates, and image URLs directly into the columns you specify.
For each brand in column A, search Google News via SerpHouse and fill in the top 3 article titles, sources, and dates into columns B through G
What You Get
- Columns B, D, and F receive the article titles for the top three news results per brand
- Columns C, E, and G receive the corresponding source names and publication dates
- A second pass with an image search prompt writes the top image URL, title, and source domain into columns H, I, and J
- Rows where no recent news exists for a brand return empty cells rather than stale results, making coverage gaps visible at a glance
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some brand names are too short and return unrelated news
For each brand in column A, append the term "company" before searching Google News via SerpHouse, and fill the top 3 article titles and sources into columns B through G
You only want news from the past 30 days
For each brand in column A, search Google News via SerpHouse filtered to the past 30 days and write the top 3 article titles, sources, and dates into columns B through G — mark column H as "No recent coverage" if SerpHouse returns no results within the window
You want to join news results with the brand category from a second tab
For each brand in column A of the "Brands" tab, search Google News via SerpHouse and write the top article title and source into columns B and C, then look up the brand's category from the "Brand Categories" tab and write it into column D so you can filter by vertical
You want to clean the brand list, pull news and image results, flag coverage gaps, and surface crisis signals in one shot
Deduplicate column A, search Google News via SerpHouse for each unique brand and write the top 3 article titles and sources into columns B through G, search Google Images via SerpHouse for the top image URL into column H, and mark column I as "Potential crisis" for any brand where the top news headline contains words like "lawsuit," "recall," "breach," or "investigation"
The CMO deck gets built. You get to spend the remaining time on the slide narrative rather than the data collection.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Google Sheet with a competitor or brand list in column A — ask SheetXAI to pull live news headlines and image results from SerpHouse and write them across your tracking sheet. See also Google Trends scoring or return to the SerpHouse overview.