You can fit 21 Vaticans in San Francisco

According to MarcoAI, San Francisco is roughly 1.8 San Marinos in size. In other words, San Marino would fit approximately 1.8 times into San Francisco’s land area. 

MarcoAI is the latest “map with an AI” to hit the market. Over the past two to three years, there’s been a noticeable surge in these tools, including Smartmap, Aino AI, and MapsGPT. Together, they form a growing category of Geospatial AI products focused on text-to-map generation, data visualization, and spatial intelligence powered by natural language processing (NLP).

Like its peers, MarcoAI handles standard text-to-map queries well, such as:

• Show me the major battle sites of the American Civil War.
• Show me historical landmarks in Rome.

Where MarcoAI really stands out, however, is its ability to highlight and generate polygon areas directly on the map. This makes it particularly strong for spatial comparison tasks, allowing users to visually compare the size and scale of different places in a way that most AI maps don’t yet handle well.

For example, MarcoAI can answer and visualize questions like:

• How many times would San Marino fit inside San Francisco?
• How many times would the Vatican fit inside San Francisco?
• How many times does Manhattan fit inside Mexico City?

Unfortunately MarcoAI currently falls short in one major area: routing. One of the example queries promoted by the product is “Show me how to go from Las Ramblas to Sagrada Familia.” However, every time I’ve asked MarcoAI for directions, it simply draws a straight line between two points rather than generating a real-world route.

Given that route planning is a core feature of virtually every online map, this is a significant limitation.