The ArcGIS Business Analyst Web App team is excited to announce the latest software update for October 2025. This release adds new functionality to analyze nearby locations, delivers highly requested improvements to credit estimation, and provides a wealth of content updates with new data to support your analysis.
ArcGIS Business Analyst is Esri’s location-based market intelligence application designed to help you make smarter decisions for market planning, site selection, and customer segmentation. As of June 2025, any ArcGIS Online user with a Creator user type or above has access to ArcGIS Business Analyst Web App Standard included with their license and can launch the app from the app-switcher to get started with ArcGIS Business Analyst.
If you’d like to learn more or want to try ArcGIS Business Analyst Web App, sign up for a 21-day free trial.
Highlights of this release include:
- NEW Nearby analysis
- Credit estimation
- Customize benchmark values
- Living Atlas layers featured content
- Histogram redesign
- Data updates
- POI data enhancements
- Top retailers search
- Infographics improvements
- Additional Enhancements
Nearby analysis workflow: Smarter insights from surrounding POIs
This release introduces a powerful new Advanced analysis workflow, continuing development efforts to support enhanced analysis capabilities for points of interest (POIs). Use point-based sites like rings, drive time, walk time, or threshold areas to define an area of interest and run the analysis. Nearby analysis is designed to help users understand the places and POIs within walking or driving distance of their sites, refining results by featured layers, custom lists, or imported web layers with points.
When running the analysis, you can combine multiple POI searches together, pulling from featured Esri–provided POI lists, your own favorited POI lists, or most excitingly: custom web layer point lists, offering users the much-requested ability to import your own layers of points to run analysis.
This new workflow provides insights into POIs near a defined area, including total points, distance, and density. Industries like retail, health care, and logistics can benefit from this workflow to optimize locations, improve delivery efficiency, and identify under-served areas.
For more details on how to run the analysis, refer to the Esri Community post on Nearby analysis and check out this ArcGIS Blog article for a tutorial on how to Use nearby analysis to explore Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) competition.
Credit estimation: Know your credit costs up front
We know that credit estimation is a big challenge for users. In fact, we received so many questions about credit consumption at the 2025 Esri User Conference, we dedicated an entire section to it in our FAQ blog article. This release brings a much-requested enhancement: an in-app credit estimation tool. Now, when exporting mapping and analysis results, infographics, and reports, users will see an Estimate credits option that calculates how many ArcGIS Online credits the action will consume. No more consulting the documentation and manually calculating your credit usage before an export. This will help users plan more effectively and manage organizational resources with confidence.
Business Analyst Web App has a wealth of powerful analytics tools to help you gather sophisticated, data-driven insights. We hope that by providing up-front clarity on credit-consumption, we can help users avoid surprises and alleviate credit anxiety. For expanded details refer to the October 2025 blog: Estimating credit consumption in Business Analyst.
Benchmark comparisons: Flexible benchmarking for smarter site comparisons
In the November 2024 release, we launched the map-based benchmark comparisons workflow, transforming the traditional comparisons report into a more visual and flexible experience.
In this release, we are enhancing it further by allowing users to define benchmarks not just by location, mean, or median — but also by setting custom values for each variable. To get started, go to Run analysis and launch Benchmark comparisons. Go through the workflow to display results, then use either option to apply the Above and below benchmark comparison method:
- Option 1 – Go to Comparison method section in the workflow pane and choose Above and below benchmark from the Method drop-down.
- Option 2 – In the Table tab of the Results pane, click options next to a location and select Make benchmark.
You also have two options for customizing your benchmark values:
- Option 1 – Click Customize benchmark values in the workflow pane.
- Option 2 – Click the Edit button directly in the table cells. This option is a quick-access way to assign a unique value.
After you customize a value, it will be highlighted in bold. When working with a large number of variables, search and filter options are provided. When changing the benchmark, a warning is provided to prevent any loss of customized values.
This added flexibility helps tailor comparisons to specific goals, making insights more relevant and actionable.
Living Atlas layers: Improved discovery with featured content
Finding the right data just got easier. The team is working hard at improving discoverability for Living Atlas layers that are compatible with Business Analyst workflows, and this update is an early phase in support of this goal.
We are introducing a featured content list for Living Atlas layers inside Business Analyst Web App. This enhancement highlights some of the most-requested layers, streamlining the browsing and discovery experience and making it easier for users to locate authoritative content for mapping, analysis, and reporting. Read the blog for more details: Discover featured ArcGIS Living Atlas content using ArcGIS Business Analyst Web App.
Improving data discovery will provide greater insight into the data with enhanced metadata on data categories and included layers, which reduces friction and improves the overall experience.
Results pane: Visualize distributions easily with the histogram redesign
The Results pane is a component found in several workflows including color-coded maps, smart map search, POI search and aggregation, benchmark comparisons, and suitability analysis. The histograms are redesigned for additional functionality and improved interpretation. The new visualization includes showing the mean, median, and legends in the histogram view, plus styling controls to adjust chart types, bin counts, outlier visibility, and zoom.
Data updates
Data updates are crucial to Business Analyst and delivering the most accurate up-to-date data and content is essential to providing robust analysis. This release includes updates to the following datasets:
- Standard demographics for 26 North American countries and 46 African countries from Michael Bauer Research (2025)
- Advanced Demographics for Canada from Environics Analytics and Statistics Canada (2025), and for France from Esri France (2025)
- Business Summary data for U.S. from Data Axle (August 2025)
- USA Traffic data from Kalibrate (Q3 2025)
For more details on data and demographics updates, refer to the What’s New for Esri Demographics (October 2025) article.
Points of interest (POI) data enhancements
ArcGIS Business Analyst provides information about specific locations–such as businesses, government buildings, landmarks, tourist attractions, and more—through points of interest (POI) data. With POI data, you can identify key businesses and community locations, plan for future expansion, locate market gaps, and perform competitive analysis.
This update has a few enhancements to POI data to highlight:
- For India POI from Esri India, Puerto Rico POI from SafeGraph, and Foursquare Open Source, there is a significant increase in record numbers.
- Data Axle has an additional attribute: chain name.
- Foursquare has been updated to support 2022 NAICS, which brings the dataset to parity with other datasets. Now you will be able to use the same NAICS code lists when switching POI data sources.
Another important update to POI that is coming in 2026, is the retirement of Standard Industrial Classification codes in favor of the North American Industry Classification System codes. For details on what to expect with this change read the blog: SIC codes transition in Business Analyst.
Top retailers search option
Perhaps the most exciting update to points of Interest (POI) data is the new top retailers search option available for SafeGraph and Data Axle provided POI. The top retailers search option is a curated list of the top 25 retailers in the United States based on sales volume. This search option is more sophisticated than an advanced search condition. Top retailers are the largest companies in the country by sales volume, and often their presence disrupts or cannibalizes local businesses. Understanding where these top retailers are located, identifying anchor-stores in your analysis areas, or finding gaps for small or independent businesses to take advantage of the market can serve as a starting point to perform other analyses including site selection, business cannibalization, competitive analysis, and market research.
What’s really special about top retailers search is the powerful semantic search capability, which includes results for both parent companies and their national or regional subsidiaries. For instance, searching for “Kroger” in Los Angeles will return results for its regional brands, Ralph’s and Food4Less, even if there’s no Kroger store directly in the area. There’s an entire blog dedicated to this topic for more reading: Search for top retailers in ArcGIS Business Analyst Web App.
Canadian Advanced Demographics HouseholdSpend variable changes
Part of providing the most current and accurate data to our users is sometimes about making changes to variables included in a dataset. This release, Environics Analytics updated its HouseholdSpend dataset to reflect modern Canadian consumer behavior, based on major changes to the Statistics Canada Survey of Household Spending. This resulted in 145 new spending variables being added, 162 retired, and many existing codes revised.
While these changes do provide new variables, the retirement of older variables means that users of ArcGIS Business Analyst Web App will need to update any dashboards, saved analyses, or automated workflows that reference the deprecated attributes. For more information on this variable change and what action users should take, please refer to the informative ArcGIS StoryMaps story authored by Esri Canada’s representative Paul Voegtle: ’25 Canadian HouseholdSpend Variable Changes.
Infographics updates
There were a few infographic updates this release, including an updated ArcGIS Tapestry panel, new Standard and Gallery templates, and localization support for the suitability analysis infographic.
ArcGIS Tapestry panel: Smarter comparisons and customization
ArcGIS Tapestry had a major release in June 2025, including new infographics and the debut of the Tapestry infographic panel. This release further enhances this experience by providing a new comparison view for the infographic panel, giving you a comprehensive understanding of your analysis area. Now, you can easily compare key demographic variables—such as population density, household income, home value, age, and diversity index—across multiple geographies (states, counties, ZIP codes) and top Tapestry segments in a single, consolidated view.
These updates make the Tapestry panel more insightful, powerful, and user-friendly, providing better means to communicate similarities and differences within areas of interest.
New infographic templates
This release includes two new Standard templates: Business Key Facts and Population Summary, and four new Gallery infographics: Demographic Summary, Housing Market Summary, Spending Behavior Summary, and Demographic Snapshot.
Business Key Facts
This two-page Standard infographic template provides a comprehensive overview of business data for your site. It contains demographic and points of interest data provided by Esri and Data Axle from the Esri Updated Demographics and ArcGIS Places datasets. Variables included in the template present information on key business statistics, the largest businesses in the area, the daytime population, the workforce, and the community. This infographic may be useful for economic developers performing hyper-local analysis.
Population Summary
This Standard template summarizes key data about population, containing demographic data provided by Esri and Michael Bauer Research GmbH from the Esri standard demographics dataset. Variables included in the template present information on population by gender, population density, and purchasing power. This infographic may be useful for gaining an overview of a community.
Demographic Overview
This is one of three new templates seen in the new user onboarding experience. This infographic template provides an overview of population facts for your site. It contains demographic data provided by Esri from the Esri Updated Demographics dataset. Variables included in the template present information on diversity index, population by race, and population by age compared to the national average. Leverage this infographic to gain a broad overview of a community’s demographic context.
Housing Market Summary
Housing Market Summary provides a comprehensive summary of the housing market, using demographic data provided by Esri and the U.S. Census Bureau from the Esri Updated Demographics and Census 2020 datasets. Variables included in the template present information on median home value, housing affordability index, households by home value, and household size. This infographic may be useful for useful for real estate developers to analyze market potential.
Spending Behavior
This infographic template is the third template featured in the new user onboarding experience and provides a comprehensive overview of consumer spending. Variables included in the template present information on average annual retail spending, median household and disposable income, and average spending by category. Use this infographic to gain understanding of a community’s consumer preferences.
Demographic Snapshot
This infographic is new for Canada and is a quick view of the most common pulled demographic variables in a simple tabular report, examining three trade areas side-by-side.
Localization update: suitability analysis infographic
This update brings even more language and localization improvements. The suitability analysis infographic template is now available in Japanese, French, and Spanish. When you launch the app in one of these languages and select a corresponding translated data source—such as Esri Japan, Esri France, or Mexico INEGI—the entire template will appear fully translated.
Additional enhancements
There are a few additional enhancements in this release, including improved accessibility, support for ArcGIS Online telemetry and language settings, and updates for Business Analyst’s mobile app and Experience Builder widget.
Improved accessibility
We are dedicated to making our infographics more accessible to all users. We have made several improvements to make progress in ensuring 508 compliance and enabling more organizations to share infographics on their websites for public information. We have improved keyboard tabbing and screen reading capabilities as well as updated colors for proper contrast for the histogram in the Results pane.
Support for AGOL settings for telemetry and language
We are pleased to announce that ArcGIS Business Analyst Web App is now part of the Esri User Experience Improvement Program. And don’t worry, no additional action is needed—users are opted in by default, and the app will send anonymous usage data to help the team better understand user behavior. These insights will enable the team to make future enhancements to provide better user experience.
We understand that personalization is a key aspect of improving the user experience in the web app. One way we have addressed this is with the new language preferences setting. This setting allows the app to automatically apply your ArcGIS Online member-level language preference, meaning that when you opt in, your Business Analyst Web App interface will now reflect your preferred language setting from ArcGIS Online. We hope that this personalization feature will create a seamless and consistent experience across the ArcGIS ecosystem.
ArcGIS Business Analyst Mobile App
Are you on the go or in the field and want to use ArcGIS Business Analyst? All you have to do is download the ArcGIS Business Analyst mobile app from the App Store or Google Play Store. This update delivers several bug fixes and minor enhancements.
ArcGIS Experience Builder: Business Analyst widget
The Business Analyst widget in ArcGIS Experience Builder is a popular tool that provides users with the ability to view additional information about any point or polygon feature on a map through the creation of reports and infographics. This update delivers several bug fixes and minor enhancements.
ArcGIS Community Analyst retirement
ArcGIS Community Analyst retires March 1, 2026. Users must migrate to either ArcGIS Business Analyst Web App Standard or Advanced.
Community Analyst remains accessible to users until their license term end date, at which time they will receive a renewal notice containing Business Analyst Web App Advanced at a discounted rate. Negotiated enterprise agreement customers were migrated in September 2025.
For further details, refer to Deprecation Notice for ArcGIS Community Analyst: Transition to ArcGIS Business Analyst Web App.
We’re so happy to share this latest release of ArcGIS Business Analyst Web App and ArcGIS Business Analyst Mobile App with you.
Below, we’ve added resources to help you with your ArcGIS Business Analyst journey:
- Business Analyst product overview page
- Review pricing and purchase Business Analyst
- Join our LinkedIn Business Analyst User Group
- Join our Business Analyst Esri Community
- Follow our weekly #BATipsandTricks posts on social media
- Read more Business Analyst blog articles on ArcGIS Blog
- Watch Business Analyst Web App videos
- Watch Business Analyst Mobile App videos
- Visit the Business Analyst Resources page
- Visit the Community Analyst Resources page
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