The Scenario
You run SEO for a site with a few hundred pages. The sitemap export is in column A — 200 URLs. Your job this week is to identify which ones are returning 404s, which are redirecting, and which are clean 200s, so the dev team knows what to prioritize before the next crawl.
The dev team is waiting on your list.
The bad version:
- Paste URL 1 into a browser, check the address bar to see if it redirected, open DevTools and look at the network tab to find the actual status code
- URL 2 is a redirect chain — it hops through three intermediary URLs before landing somewhere, and you have to trace the chain manually to find the final destination
- By URL 30 you have given up on the redirect chain tracing and are just noting "redirects somewhere" which is not useful information for the dev team
The list exists. The status codes exist. The problem is the 200 round trips between you and the server to retrieve them.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the URL list in column A and through its built-in ZenRows integration it can retrieve the original HTTP status code for each URL — bypassing intermediary redirect presentation — and write the status code and any error detail into columns B and C.
For each URL in column A, use ZenRows to check the original HTTP status code and write the status code and any error message into columns B and C
What You Get
- Column B: the HTTP status code returned for each URL — 200, 301, 302, 404, 500, etc.
- Column C: any error message or additional detail returned alongside the status
- ZenRows returns the status code of the original request, not a cached or browser-modified version
- Rows where ZenRows itself cannot reach the URL get a connection error note in column C
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You want to separate redirect destination URLs from the original ones
For each URL in column A, use ZenRows to check the HTTP status code and write it into column B — for any URL that returns a 301 or 302, write the final redirect destination URL into column D
You only want to surface the broken URLs — skip anything returning 200
For each URL in column A, use ZenRows to check the status code — write the status into column B for all rows, then filter to show only rows where column B is not 200 and sort them by status code ascending in a summary table starting at column F
Some URLs are on a staging subdomain and you want to test both staging and production versions
For each URL in column A, use ZenRows to check the status code of the URL as-is and write it into column B — also construct the production equivalent by replacing "staging." with "" in the URL, check that status code, and write it into column C
Full triage pass — status codes, redirect destinations, and a prioritized fix list
For each URL in column A, check the HTTP status code with ZenRows and write it into column B — write any redirect destination into column D, flag 404s in column E as "fix required," flag redirect chains longer than one hop in column F as "review redirect logic," and create a summary count in cell H1 of how many URLs returned each status code
One prompt. The status checking, the redirect logging, and the summary count.
Try It
Open your sitemap export in a Google Sheet and get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI. Ask it to audit the status codes for every URL in column A and surface the 404s and redirect chains. For scraping content from the pages that are returning 200s, see the plaintext extraction or bulk auto-parse spokes.