Asking a map a question and getting an answer with numbers

You can ask xMap Flows a question about places in plain words, such as "how many gyms are within 2 km of Queen Street West, and where are the gaps?", and get an answer in numbers: how many there are, how many are chains, how well they are rated, how many people live there for each one, and which part of the circle has the fewest. The price is shown before anything runs, and one more click turns the question into an AI employee that asks it again every week.

This article is for people who need a quick read on a market before a meeting, a site visit or a decision: expansion leads, franchise developers, analysts, consultants. It covers what to ask, what comes back, how to read it honestly, and when a one-off answer should become a weekly report.

What you can ask

Ask in the Ask xMap panel or in the box at the top of the Flows page. The question needs three things, and anything missing is filled in or asked back:

• The kind of place: up to three at once, such as pharmacies, or gyms and yoga studios. Everyday words work: "coffee" finds coffee shops and cafes.
• The place: a city, a district or an address. If you leave it out and xMap remembers your company's city, it uses that.
• The distance: 1, 2 or 5 km around the place. Without one, it uses 5 km.

Questions about people ("how many people per pharmacy", "where are the gaps", "who lives there") also look at the population grid. Questions only about the places do not.

What comes back

1. A card with what it understood and the price. Answer it, or Not now.
2. It searches xMap's places database for the nearest 500 of each kind around the point, and, for people, the population grid in the same circle.
3. The answer, in words and figures: the count (shown as 500+ when the search was full), places per square kilometre, chains and independents, the average rating, the people living there and the people for each place.
4. The gaps: the circle is cut into nine equal parts, and the parts with the most people for each place are named (the north-east, the centre...) and drawn on a small map with the places.

Reading the answer honestly

The count is what xMap's places database lists inside the circle, not a census of every business. It is a strong guide for comparing places and spotting gaps, and it should be read that way.

The gaps need care. A part of the circle with no places at all may be a park, a rail yard or water rather than an opportunity, which is why xMap's market pages, using the same nine-part grid over a 10 km circle, never name a part that holds none at all as the place for a new one. Where people are counted, the answer weighs places against residents, which filters out most empty land; where they are not, look at the map before you trust a gap.

An example with real figures

Market pages answer the same kind of question for a few cities over a wider circle, and give a feel for what comes back. Within 10 km of the centre of London, xMap's places database lists 866 pharmacies (November 2026). The rest of the page is worked out from the 438 nearest the centre: 91 of them belong to a chain and 347 are independent, and the 413 with a rating average 3.9 out of 5. A circle that holds that many is too full to say which part has the fewest, and since there are no population figures for the United Kingdom, it stays a count of places, not of people per place.

866Pharmacies listed

438Nearest counted

347Independent

3.9Average rating

In Toronto, where residents are counted, the same kind of question can go a step further. The market page lists 246 gyms within 10 km of the centre, 72 of them chains (November 2026); asking the map about a 2 km circle around a particular street adds the people living there and the people for each gym. See the London pharmacies and Toronto gyms pages.

Good questions and weak ones

Questions phrased so the map can answer them.

From a question to an AI employee

If the answer is worth knowing next week too, press Make this run every week under it. That saves the same question as a draft flow, which you can change before deploying:

1. A Schedule for every Monday.
2. An Area of interest: your place with the same distance around it.
3. Nearby places for the kinds you asked about.
4. Only new, so each week brings only places it has not seen before.
5. An Email with the new ones and a map with all of them.

Add Demographics if you want the people around each new place, or a scoring step to rank them. The who lives around new places and new homes with no supermarket yet templates are fuller versions of the same idea.