Spark September Product Update: Ask Spark, Site Screening, and Trendlines

Hi Spark users and friends,

🍂 Happy October! It’s hard to believe there are only three more months of 2026. The El Niño heat is finally fading across the country, but there’s one thing that isn’t cooling down: new releases at Spark.

Here are just some of the features that leveled up Spark in September:

💬 Ask Spark

For over a year, Spark’s database has had one of the largest repositories of geo-located documents available anywhere. Now, it’s easy to pull answers straight from our data.

With Ask Spark, you can directly query from Spark’s terabyte-sized database in natural language. As always, each finding and claim is rigorously cited, and hundreds of data points are processed and filed into the appropriate project, person, or news item. It’s never been easier to use Spark — just fire up a Report, click “Ask Spark” in the lower right corner, and type in your thoughts!

🗺️ Site screening

Have a site that you want quickly screened? Spark can do that.

With Site Screening, you can drag and drop any KMZ or KML and instantly get detailed findings. We’ll tell you everything you need to know, from the site owner to expected timelines. Site Diligence brings Spark’s data to the parcel level and gives you an immediate verdict, so that you know right away how to proceed.

🕵️ Stakeholder intelligence upgrades

Last month, users loved our new Stakeholder feature. Every jurisdiction now contains full dossiers on each councilmember and commissioner: voting record, political overview, and important causes.

This month, Stakeholders & Decisions got even stronger.

We’ve upgraded this section in a few ways:

1. For each location, you can now track both city- and county-level stakeholders in one easy view

2. Dossiers now include official profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter/X, and Instagram

3. And by popular demand, it’s now easy to export all the stakeholder information with one click into a clean, exec-ready PDF

📈 Sentiment Trendlines

We’ve gotten great feedback on our sentiment reports, which give you on-the-ground detail of local pushback and support. Now, for every county, we’re moving from sentiment as a snapshot to a trendline.

See how sentiment shifts as the national and local mood changes.

Coming up!

As we enter 2026’s home stretch, we have no plans of slowing! Watch out for exciting changes and upgrades as we keep building, including an upgraded executive summary export and exciting new diligence features.

As always, we'd love to hear what you think. Please share your thoughts, stories, and the features you'd like to see. You can reach us by replying directly to this email or grabbing time with our team.

🎃 Have a great October!

The Spark AI Team