The Scenario
The programmatic team needs a targeting taxonomy by Thursday. You manage content operations at a mid-size publisher, and the ad ops lead has been asking for three weeks. You have a Google Sheet with 500 article titles and descriptions in columns A and B — every piece published in the last quarter. The ask: classify each one into IAB content categories so the CMS can start routing inventory to the right advertiser buckets.
The bad version:
- Look up the IAB taxonomy documentation to understand the category hierarchy, which has two levels and dozens of subcategories.
- Copy the first article description, paste it into the TextRazor API explorer with the IAB classifier enabled, scroll through the response to find the category confidence scores, manually enter the top category into column C and the score into column D.
- Realize after 15 rows that the ad ops lead wants both the top category and the second category, which means you also need column E and F — go back and redo the first 15 rows.
Five hundred rows at 3 minutes per row is 25 hours of classification work. The Thursday deadline was never realistic for manual processing. What you actually needed was a way to send the whole sheet through the API at once and get a consistent output format back.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads your columns, understands the data, and through its built-in TextRazor integration can classify every row against the IAB taxonomy and write category labels and scores back in one operation.
Classify each text in column A using TextRazor's IAB content taxonomy and write the top category and its confidence score into columns B and C.
What You Get
- Column B receives the top IAB content category label for each row — e.g., "Technology & Computing" or "Sports/Golf."
- Column C receives the confidence score for that classification, expressed as a decimal between 0 and 1.
- Rows where TextRazor returns no category above a minimum threshold get a flagged value in column B rather than a blank.
- All 500 rows process in a single run with consistent column formatting throughout.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You need two categories per row, not one
For each description in column A, classify it using the TextRazor IAB taxonomy v3.0 and put the top two categories and confidence scores into columns B, C, D, and E.
The descriptions are very short — one sentence or less
For each title and description pair in columns A and B, concatenate them before sending to TextRazor IAB classification, then write the top two category labels and scores into columns C, D, E, and F.
Some rows have already been classified manually
Classify each row in column A using TextRazor IAB taxonomy, but only process rows where column B is empty. Write the category into column B and the score into column C for those rows only.
Full kill chain: clean, classify, audit
For each description in column A, trim whitespace and remove any rows that are duplicates, classify the remaining texts using the TextRazor IAB taxonomy v3.0, write the top two categories and scores into columns B through E, and add a 'Category Summary' sheet listing each unique category, how many articles it covers, and the average confidence score.
One prompt that handles the cleaning and the classification means the output is ready to hand off — no intermediate step.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the Google Sheet with your article inventory. Ask SheetXAI to classify every description using the TextRazor IAB taxonomy and write the category labels and scores directly into the columns your ad ops team is waiting for. Also worth reading: the IPTC media topic tagging spoke if your CMS uses that taxonomy instead.