How Analyze picks and ranks your competitors

What Analyze is doing

Analyze answers one question: of every place at your level, which ten are most like you for the kind of project you chase? It does that in four moves:

1. Turn your project type into a set of weights over the five competitiveness layers.
2. Measure the distance between your layer scores and every other place's, using those weights.
3. Keep the ten nearest, optionally screened to a similar population.
4. Compare you against them on the key measures that project type cares about.

Nothing here is AI-generated and nothing is personalised to your account — two people running Analyze on the same community with the same project type get the same set. For how the five layer scores themselves are built, see How scores are calculated.

Project-type weights

Each of the five project types weights the layers differently:

These are the product's raw layer weights, which is why the rows do not each add to 1. A sixth weight covering site screening carries no per-place score, so Analyze drops it and rescales the five that remain to add to 1 before measuring similarity. That rescaling changes nothing about the ordering — only the relative emphasis between the five layers matters.

A bit of everything is selected by default.

How similarity and the peer set work

For every candidate place, Analyze takes the difference between your score and theirs on each of the five layers, squares it, multiplies it by that project type's weight, adds the five up and takes the square root. That number is the distance. How similar is simply 100 − distance, floored at 0 and rounded, so 100% means identical layer scores under that weighting.

The candidates are then sorted by distance and the ten nearest become your competitive set. Geography plays no part: a place on the other side of the country with a matching economic profile will outrank a neighbour whose profile diverges.

The population band

Only show similar-sized places is on by default. While it is on, candidates must sit between 0.3× and 3.5× your population before they are ranked at all. Turn it off and the whole level is eligible, which often changes the set completely — closer-profile places of very different size displace the similar-sized ones that were there before.

Places that carry no usable population are excluded by the band, so the set can be shorter than ten in sparsely covered levels.

Which measures each project type compares

The At a glance win counts, the Where you win / Where they beat you callouts, the versus table and the scorecard all read the same short list of key measures. The list depends on the project type and on the level, because some fields only exist at some levels.

At Metro and County level the same lists apply with four substitutions, which is why a metro or county head-to-head can have fewer rows than the state one:

How wins and the scorecard are decided

Winner per measure

Each measure knows which direction is better — lower electricity rates win, higher broadband wins, a tax climate rank of #1 is best. A row is You or Them accordingly, and an exact tie reads Even. You lead X of Y counts your wins against every comparable measure, including the ties in the denominator; the plain-language tone of the callouts uses only the measures that were actually decided, so an even matchup never reads as a loss.

Callouts are ordered by how large the gap is relative to the whole dataset's range for that measure, so the biggest real differences come first. A right-to-work split is treated as a fixed, mid-sized gap rather than being scaled, since there is no range to normalise against.

Step 5: Your scorecard vs. this set

The scorecard ranks you against all ten peers at once rather than against one rival. For each key measure it shows your value, the competitors' median, and your position as 3rd of 11 — you plus every peer that has a usable value for that measure.

Your rank is 1 plus the number of places in that group that beat you on that measure. Ranks are then split into thirds by position within the group, not by raw rank, so being 1st of 2 counts as the top third rather than the middle:

• Lead with (across your full peer set) lists every measure where you sit in the top third or are outright first.
• Watch (across your full peer set) lists every measure where you sit in the bottom third or are outright last.

Neither pill is padded. If nothing is genuinely strong, Lead with does not appear at all — that is the honest answer, not a bug. A right-to-work row has no rank; it reads N of M competitors are right-to-work instead.

Incentive firepower

The head-to-head shows an Incentive firepower card at State level only. It reads the same per-state incentive aggregates as the Incentives screen: an Incentive Competitiveness Score badge and the total tracked award value for each side, above a sentence reading "You lead / trail / match <rival> on incentive competitiveness — ICS X vs Y."

The card hides only when one of the two states has no incentive aggregate at all or no usable score. A state with limited disclosure still appears — its ICS badge is shown in grey to mark that the score rests on national fallbacks rather than on the state's own record. See How Incentive Intelligence figures are computed.

The compete report and its PDF

Generate Report opens the Competitive Position Report: KPIs (Overall score, Rank in set, Closest match, Peers analyzed), Your Competitive Set, How You Stack Up (a layer radar against the peer median plus a composite-score bar chart), one or two Head-to-Head tables, and The Bottom Line. Its footnote names the five layers and the sources behind them.

Download Report saves a PDF that mirrors the screen — nothing is recalculated — but with four caps:

Because the report is capped at ten peers anyway, the 25-row cap never bites in practice; the 15-row and 2-table caps can.

The print fallback

Opening the report also records it in your account's report history in the background. Download Report can only produce a stored PDF once that record has landed. Click it in the first moment after the report opens and it falls back to your browser's print dialog instead, where you can still "Save as PDF" — the file just won't be attached to the history row. Wait a moment and click again to get the saved PDF, confirmed by the toast Report PDF saved; the PDF opens in a new tab and a PDF link appears on the row in Recent reports.

Common questions

Q: What are the actual weights behind each project type? A: They're in Project-type weights above. The short version: Manufacturing leans hardest on cost, Tech and Headquarters on workforce and quality of life, Distribution on cost and regulatory, and "A bit of everything" spreads almost evenly.

Q: Which measures count as "key measures" for my project type? A: See Which measures each project type compares. The list is fixed per project type and trimmed at metro and county level where a field doesn't exist, which is the usual reason a metro head-to-head is shorter than the state one.

Q: Why does my competitive set show a state marked "Limited disclosure" in the incentive firepower card? A: Because the card only hides when a state has no incentive aggregate at all. A limited-disclosure state does have one — its score just leans on national fallbacks, so the badge is greyed to tell you to weight it less.

Q: What is "Your scorecard vs. this set" and how is "Your rank" computed? A: It's the fifth and last step of the wizard, and it compares you with all ten competitors at once rather than with one rival. Your rank on a measure is 1 plus the number of places in the group that beat you on it, shown as "3rd of 11". The top third of positions becomes Lead with, the bottom third Watch.

Q: Can I add my own competitor to the head-to-head? A: No. The head-to-head only runs against a row in the set of ten Analyze built. If you already know who you want to line up, use Compare inside Explore instead — see Compare locations.

Q: Does the compete report PDF match the screen exactly? A: Yes, with caps. It captures the on-screen report rather than recalculating anything, but trims to 25 competitive-set rows, at most two head-to-head tables of 15 rows each, and four Bottom Line points.

Q: Why did Download Report open my browser's print dialog? A: You clicked it before the report's history record had finished saving. The print dialog is the fallback so you are never stuck without a copy. Go back, wait a couple of seconds and click Download Report again — you should get the Report PDF saved toast and a PDF link on the history row.

Related

• Find who you compete with (Analyze)
• How scores are calculated
• How Incentive Intelligence figures are computed
• Compare locations