Search points of interest

Available with Business Analyst license.

You can search points of interest (POI), such as businesses and facilities, using data from Data Axle, SafeGraph, Foursquare, and other POI data sources. For example, you can search for hospitals or search using the name of a specific hospital. You can also search within a category, industry, or search using codes.

Note:

Esri Demographics provides documentation about all included data:

• For information about the datasets included with Business Analyst, see Esri U.S. data fact sheet and Esri global data fact sheet.
• To learn about the geographic boundaries available, see What is Esri demographic data.

Points of Interest Search workflow

Before starting a search, set the Business Analyst data source. The options available in the Points of Interest Search workflow are dependent on the Business Analyst data source.

Note:

Performing a points of interest search consumes credits when the Business Analyst data source is set to ArcGIS Online.

To search for points of interest, complete the following steps:

1. On the Analysis tab, click Business Analysis to open the gallery, and click Points of Interest Search.

   The Points of Interest Search workflow pane opens.

2. Optionally, choose a POI data source.

   Note:

   The Points of Interest Search pane only shows the Data Source option when a Business Analyst data source contains more than one POI data provider. For example, if you are using the United States (Esri 2023) data source from ArcGIS Online, you can choose Data Axle, SafeGraph, or Foursquare as the data source.

3. In the Business/Facility name or type section, type a search term.

   For example, you can type coffee shop or the name of a coffee chain. You can refine your search by doing any of the following:

   • Click the Category button to select categories or search for a category and press Enter. Expand a category to view and select subcategories. Click Done to close the category menu.
   • Click the Options button and do any of the following:
     • Choose Find related POI to perform a semantic search, returning a broader range of search results related to the search term you entered.
     • Choose Exact match to narrow the search results to exact matches only.
     • Choose Company name only to only return results that have the search term in the company/business name.
4. Alternatively, choose one of the other search types:
   • Select Search by code to search by NAICS, SIC, or Foursquare codes. Use the Code Type drop-down menu to select NAICS, SIC, or Foursquare as the type of code, depending on the POI data source selected. Use the Business Code(s) drop-down menu to browse codes or type search terms to find codes. Select the code and click Add code. You can add multiple codes to your search.
   • Choose Show All to search for all businesses.
5. Optionally, expand More options to set the following:
   • Use the Search extent drop-down menu to limit the search to the display extent or to a map layer's extent.
   • Use the Search limit field to specify a limit on the number of businesses/POI to return. By default, a maximum of 5,000 points are returned when using ArcGIS Online as the Business Analyst data source.
6. Click Next.

   The search results appear in the Points of Interest Search pane with options to filter the search.

7. Refine the results using the following filtering options:
   • Click the check boxes to select single or multiple categories.
   • Expand any category, hover over an option, and click Only to deselect all other options in the category.
   • Expand numerical categories, such as Employee Count or Sales Volume/Assets ($000), to define minimum and maximum values.

     Note:

     Some fields are not available for all data sources.

   • Click Reset to remove the filters you set.
8. Visualize the results using the following options:
   • Click Preview Map to see the results on the map.

   • Click Preview Table to see the results in a tabular form.

   You can select a row in the attribute table to highlight the associated record on the map.

9. Click Next.
10. Specify the Output name.
11. Click Finish.

    The workflow pane closes and a point layer with the results of the Points of Interest Search workflow is added to the map.

Geoprocessing tool

The Points of Interest Search workflow uses the Generate Points from Business Listings tool. You can use this geoprocessing tool directly to perform the same search and build and run queries through a Python script or a model.