The Scenario
A real estate developer handed you a spreadsheet of 20 candidate store locations and asked for a site analysis by Friday. You're the retail site selection analyst. The question they care about is simple: which sites have the best foot-traffic indicators — how many competitors, supermarkets, and bus stops are within walking distance of each one?
TomTom's POI search can answer that. What you don't have is a way to run 20 locations through it without doing each one manually.
The bad version:
- Open TomTom's developer sandbox, enter the first location's coordinates, pick a category, run the search, count the results, type the number into the sheet
- Switch to the next category, repeat, then move to location 2 and do it all again
- 20 locations times 3 categories is 60 individual searches, each requiring you to manually read a count from a JSON response and type it into a cell
This is the kind of task that sounds like it will take 30 minutes and takes three hours. The developer wants analysis on Friday, not a description of why you spent Thursday doing data entry.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads each location's coordinates, calls TomTom category search for each one, and writes the POI counts back into the sheet — all at once.
For each location's lat/lng in columns A and B, search for nearby POIs within 500 metres using TomTom category search for competitors (grocery stores), supermarkets, and bus stops, and write the count of each category into columns C, D, and E
What You Get
- Column C: count of grocery/competitor POIs within 500m of each site
- Column D: count of supermarkets within 500m
- Column E: count of bus stops within 500m
- Zero counts where TomTom found nothing in that category at that location
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Site coordinates aren't in the sheet yet — only addresses
For each address in column A, geocode it using TomTom and write lat/lng into columns B and C. Then for each location, search for nearby competitors, supermarkets, and bus stops within 500 metres using TomTom and write the counts into columns D, E, and F
You need the actual names of the nearest POIs, not just counts
For each location's lat/lng in columns A and B, search for the nearest 3 competitors within 500 metres using TomTom and write each one's name and distance in metres into columns C through H
Search radius varies by site
For each site, use the lat/lng in columns A and B and the search radius in metres in column C. Search for nearby supermarkets using TomTom and write the count into column D and the name and distance of the nearest one into columns E and F.
Full site scoring in one pass
For each location's lat/lng in columns A and B, use TomTom to count competitors within 500m (write to column C), supermarkets within 500m (column D), and bus stops within 500m (column E). Then calculate a composite score as (C + D + E) and write it into column F. Sort the sheet by column F descending when done.
One prompt runs all three searches, scores each site, and sorts the output.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the Google Sheet with your candidate site coordinates, then ask it to search for nearby POIs using TomTom. For finding specific named POIs rather than category counts, also see the named POI search spoke.