Create and export Insights reports
Pick a report type and one or more locations, generate a profile or comparative report, download it as a PDF, and revisit past reports from the report history list.
Before you start
- Reports is one of the sidebar areas inside Insights, alongside Ask, Explore, Analyze, and Incentives.
- A report always covers a location: a state, a metro area, a county, a city, or an Economic Development District (EDD), an EDA-designated region with its own coded economic-development priorities (see Explore EDD regions).
- You can also start a report from Explore or from the Incentives catalog, without visiting the Reports tab first. See What happens next.
Steps
Choose a report type
- On the Reports tab's landing screen, pick a card from Choose a report type. Each card names the audience it's built for (for example "State EDOs & Policymakers" or "Site Selectors & Regional EDOs") and shows an example subject. Report types include City report, District Priorities, Metro Market Analysis, County Profile, State Competitiveness Report, Board Intelligence Brief, Economic Momentum Report, and Incentive Landscape (state-only, built from Incentive Intelligence data).
Pick a location or locations
- Type into the search box to find a subject. The placeholder and pool depend on the report type: state reports search states, metro reports search metros, county reports search counties, city reports search the full place index, and District Priorities searches EDD districts. Click a result to add it.
- Add up to 5 locations. Adding a second location switches the button to Generate comparative [report name]; the field shows how many of the 5 you've used. Remove a location by clicking the X on its chip.
- Click Generate [report name] (or Generate comparative [report name] for 2 or more). One location produces a standard profile report; two to five produce a comparative report with every location side by side.
Read a profile report
A single-location report opens with:
- An Executive Summary with the composite score, a tier badge, and an AI-written analyst summary: a short narrative generated from the report's own numbers, not a live chat. While it is still generating, the summary area shows a loading state; if generation fails, a template-based summary appears instead, so the report is never empty.
- Competitive Position: the five layer scores (Cost, Workforce, Risk, Quality of Life, Regulatory) as tiles with a bar under each.
- National Benchmarking: every key metric shown as a percentile bar against the full pool of locations at that level.
- SWOT Analysis: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, preferring the AI narrative's points and falling back to deterministic ones where the narrative has none.
- Key Metrics vs. National Average: a table of the location's value, the national average, its percentile, and whether it beats the average.
- Strategic Recommendations: a numbered list of suggested talking points.
- The Incentive Landscape report replaces the generic metrics sections with an Incentive Competitiveness Score, the state's incentive programs, award value by category, top recipients, award-tier distribution, and recent megadeals — all attributed to Incenti Subsidy Intelligence.
Read a comparative report
Selecting 2–5 locations produces a comparative report instead: a scorecard per location, a side-by-side layer-score table with the leader on each dimension marked, a merged national-benchmarking table (best value per metric highlighted), a strengths-and-weaknesses card per location, and comparative recommendations. The City report and District Priorities report have their own comparative layouts built the same way.
Export the report
- Use the toolbar at the top of the report:
- All reports returns to the report-type picker without losing the report from history.
- Download Report generates the report's PDF. For most report types this also saves the PDF to the report's history row so it can be reopened later; while the AI summary is still generating, the button is visually disabled and clicking it shows a message asking you to wait rather than downloading an incomplete report.
- A comparative report for states, metros, or counties does not offer a PDF yet: its Download Report button stays disabled. See Common questions.
Revisit report history
The Reports tab's landing screen also lists Recent reports: every report anyone on your account has generated, newest first, with who generated it and when. Each row shows:
- Open — reopens the report by re-resolving its saved locations. If a location no longer exists in the current data (a rare geography change), the row shows a message instead of the report.
- Open in Analyze — for a compete report generated from Analyze; it takes you to the Analyze wizard instead of rendering inline here.
- Unavailable — the report's recipe couldn't be read, so it can't be reopened; only the record of who generated it and when remains.
- A PDF link, once a Download Report save has produced one.
- A trash-can icon to delete the row, which asks for confirmation because deleting removes it from Recent reports for everyone on the account.
What happens next
- Generating a report immediately records a row in report history, even before you download anything — history tracks every report generated, not just saved PDFs.
- Report history is account-wide: everyone on your account sees every report generated from Reports, Explore, Analyze, and the Incentives catalog in one shared list.
- Create report in Explore, and report launchers inside Analyze and the Incentives catalog, open the same standardized report on top of your current selection — you don't have to re-pick locations on the Reports tab. Compete reports built through Analyze appear in this history too, but only reopen through Analyze, not inline here.
Economic development organizations mainly generate a profile report for their own state, metro, county, or city — pulling the Executive Summary, score tiles, and SWOT straight into a board packet or an attraction pitch deck, and reaching for the Incentive Landscape report when a prospect asks what incentive programs are on offer.
Site selectors mainly generate a comparative report across a client's shortlist — 2 to 5 candidate locations at once — so the scorecards, benchmarking table, and per-location strengths-and-weaknesses cards can go straight into a site-selection deliverable without manual side-by-side formatting.
Common questions
Q: Why does an older report say "Unavailable" instead of letting me open it? A: A report's history row stores a small recipe (which report type and which locations) rather than a frozen copy of the report. "Unavailable" means that recipe couldn't be read — usually because it came from a report type that's since been retired. The row still shows who generated it and when; it just can't be regenerated.
Q: Can a colleague see my reports? A: Yes. Recent reports lists every report generated by anyone on your account, not just your own, and any admin or member can delete a row — doing so removes it for the whole account, which is why the delete button asks for confirmation first.
Q: Why does the PDF differ from what I see on screen? A: It shouldn't — Download Report captures the exact on-screen state (scores, narrative, benchmarking rows) into the PDF rather than recalculating anything, so what you see when you click Download Report is what gets saved. If the AI summary was still generating when you clicked, wait for it to finish first; downloading mid-generation is blocked so you don't save an incomplete report.
Q: How do I add more than 5 locations to a report? A: Reports cap every location picker at 5, whether you're building a profile or a comparative report. If you need to cover more locations, run a second report, or use Explore's CSV export (up to 10 states, metros, or counties, and 15 cities) for a broader data pull outside the report format.
Q: I generated a comparative report but the Download Report button looks disabled. Is that a bug? A: PDF download is not available yet for a comparative report of states, metros, or counties; the button is disabled on purpose there. City and District Priorities comparative reports, and every single-location report, do support Download Report. For a state, metro, or county comparison, generate a single-location report per location, or export the same selection as CSV from Explore.
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