All 14 of them. The 4 marked below appear on every report; the rest appear when they apply, and they are listed here because the ones that apply conditionally are the ones a reader most wants to know exist.
- A score is a position, not a verdictalways shown
- Every score in this report is a comparison against other areas of the same kind, not a measurement of whether a business will succeed. An area at the top of the ranking is the best of what was measured here; it is not a guarantee, and the ranking says nothing about rent, staffing, licensing, footfall at a specific address, or the operator.
- Factor scores are blends, component ranks are percentilesalways shown
- A component's rank is a genuine percentile among the comparable areas named beside it. A factor score is a weighted mean of those percentiles, so a factor scoring 88 is not the same claim as sitting at the 88th percentile. Both are shown so the difference is visible.
- The unit is an area, not a sitealways shown
- Scores describe a whole census area. Two sites a block apart inside the same area receive the same score, and the difference between them can decide the business. Use this to choose where to look, then look.
- Ranked within one metro area, not nationally
- These scores are positions among comparable areas in the same metro area. A score of 80 here means the top of this metro, which is a different claim from the top of the country, and it cannot be compared with a score of 80 from another metro.
- Not every factor could be computed
- Where a factor had no data for an area it was removed from that area's score and the remaining weights were spread over what was left, rather than filled with a zero. That keeps the score honest about what it measured, and it means a score built from fewer factors is not directly comparable with one built from all six.
- Some survey estimates are imprecise
- American Community Survey figures are estimates with published margins of error, and margins widen as areas get smaller. At least one input behind this report exceeds the reliability threshold, which is flagged where it occurs. Treat those figures as indicative of direction rather than as measurements.
- Competitor counts cover part of the country
- Competitor locations come from an openly licensed extract that covers Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia. Outside those states no competitors were counted, which is not the same as none existing, and the competition factor is left uncomputed rather than scored zero.
- A zero that means zero
- Where saturation is reported as zero for this area, the establishment source does cover it and lists none of this kind of business. That is a finding rather than missing data, and it can mean an unserved market or one that has already been tried.
- Business counts trail the population figures
- County Business Patterns is published about a year behind the American Community Survey, so the establishment counts in this report describe an earlier year than the demographics. Both vintages are named in the sources section.
- Network node density ranks, it does not count junctions
- The road network measure counts points where separate road segments meet in the source, which overcounts real junctions because a street is split wherever its name or county changes. The ranking between areas holds; the absolute figure should not be read as a junction count.
- Daytime population counts jobs, not people present
- The daytime term is built from where people work. It captures a business district filling up on a weekday morning and misses a shopping centre or a campus whose visitors are not employed there.
- Distances are straight lines, not drive times
- Accessibility and competitor distances are measured over the ground rather than along a route. A river, a rail line or a limited-access highway between two points makes the real journey longer than the figure shown.
- This ranking reflects the weighting you chose
- The weights applied here are not the sector defaults. They change how the six factor scores combine into one number, and therefore the order of the ranking; they do not change any factor score. The weighting used is listed in the method section so the result can be reproduced.
- How this text was writtenalways shown
- The findings in this report are generated from the stored analysis by a fixed procedure, not written by hand and not written by a language model. Every sentence is composed from figures shown elsewhere in the document, which is why the wording is plain and repeats itself between reports.