How to Make a Sunburst Chart with AI

A sunburst chart can turn a complex dataset into a simple, beautiful visualization, but building one in a spreadsheet often feels like a chore. You have to wrestle with formatting your data just right, hunt through chart options, and spend way too much time tweaking settings. What if you could skip all that and just ask for the chart you want?

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Modern AI tools are revolutionizing data analysis by letting you create sophisticated charts, including sunbursts, using simple, plain English. This guide explains what a sunburst chart is, when you should use one, and how you can create them in seconds - no formulas or complex BI software required.

What Exactly is a Sunburst Chart?

Think of a sunburst chart as a next-level pie chart. While a standard pie or donut chart shows the proportions of a single category, a sunburst chart visualizes hierarchical data, showing how different sub-categories contribute to the whole picture.

It's built with a series of concentric rings radiating out from a central circle:

• The Center Circle: This represents the total value or the very top of the hierarchy. For example, "Total Website Visitors."
• The Inner Rings: Each ring moving outwards represents the next level of the hierarchy, broken down from the previous ring. The first ring might show "Traffic Channels" (Organic Search, Social, Direct).
• The Outer Rings: The subsequent rings continue to break down the data further. The ring outside "Organic Search" could split into "Google" and "Bing," and the next ring could show campaigns or landing pages.

The size of each segment in a ring is proportional to its value, so you can instantly see which components are the biggest contributors. It’s an incredibly intuitive way to grasp the composition of your data at multiple levels simultaneously.

The Right (and Wrong) Times to Use a Sunburst Chart

A sunburst chart is a powerful tool, but it's not the right choice for every situation. Knowing when to use it is just as important as knowing how to build it.

Use A Sunburst Chart When...

• You have hierarchical data. This is the number one requirement. If your data has a clear parent-child relationship (e.g., Year > Quarter > Month, or Region > Country > City), a sunburst chart is ideal for visualizing it.
• You need to show a part-to-whole relationship. Sunbursts excel at showing the breakdown of a total amount. They make it easy to see what percentage of total traffic comes from a specific social media campaign or what portion of total revenue is attributable to a single product category.
• You want to highlight the largest segments of a whole. The visual nature of the chart makes it immediately obvious which sub-categories are the most significant. If 80% of your sales come from one product line, it will dominate the chart.

Practical examples include:

• Marketing: Visualizing website traffic from Google Analytics, broken down by Channel > Source/Medium > Campaign.
• E-commerce: Analyzing Shopify sales by Product Category > Product > Variant.
• Sales: Breaking down deals in Salesforce by Industry > Company Size > Deal Source.
• Finance: Showing budget allocation by Department > Team > Project.

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…And When to Use Something Else

• You're showing changes over time. A sunburst chart represents a snapshot in time. To track trends, use a line chart or an area chart.
• You need to compare individual, non-hierarchical categories. If you're comparing the performance of unrelated marketing campaigns, a simple bar chart is much clearer and easier to read.
• You have too many categories or levels. A sunburst with a dozen rings or hundreds of tiny slivers becomes cluttered and impossible to interpret. Stick to 2-4 levels of hierarchy for clarity.

Making a Sunburst Chart: The Old Way vs. The AI Way

Historically, creating a sunburst chart required a certain level of technical skill, patience, and time.

The Manual Method: Wrangling Spreadsheets

If you wanted to build a sunburst chart in Excel or Google Sheets, the process typically involved:

1. Exporting data from various sources (like Google Analytics, Shopify, etc.) into one or more CSV files.
2. Cleaning and structuring the data into a perfect hierarchical format, often involving multiple columns for parents and sub-categories.
3. Creating pivot tables to summarize the data correctly.
4. Navigating the chart menus to find the "Sunburst" option.
5. Spending the next 30 minutes tweaking labels, colors, and titles until it's readable.

This process is slow, tedious, and prone to errors. One wrong step in the data prep and you have to start all over. And worse, the final chart is static. If you need an update for next week's meeting, you have to repeat the entire process from scratch.

The Modern Method: Using AI and Natural Language

AI-powered analytics platforms change the game entirely. Instead of you needing to learn the software's every quirk, the software learns to understand you. You don't need to know how to structure the data or which buttons to click. You just need to know what question you want to answer.

The process is conversational. You describe the chart you want, and the AI builds it for you by connecting directly to your live data sources. It understands the context, generates the visualization, and lets you ask follow-up questions to dig deeper.

How to Create a Sunburst Chart with AI: A Step-by-Step Guide

Ready to try it out? Here’s how you can go from data to a fully interactive sunburst chart in under a minute using an AI data platform.

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Step 1: Get Your Data Sources Connected

Before you can ask any questions, the AI needs access to your data. The first step is to connect your marketing and sales platforms. In modern tools, this is usually a pain-free process without any complex setup.

You can typically connect sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, Facebook Ads, Salesforce, and HubSpot with a just few clicks by authenticating your account. If your data is in a spreadsheet, you can also connect a Google Sheet. This one-time connection puts all your data in one place, so you don't have to keep downloading CSVs.

Step 2: Ask for the Chart in Plain English

This is where the magic happens. You don't need to be a prompt engineer to get results. Just type a simple, clear request describing what you want to visualize. The AI understands the underlying structure of your connected data sources, so it knows what "sessions," "revenue," or "deals" means in context.

Here are a few examples of simple prompts you could use:

For a Marketer Using Google Analytics:

Show a sunburst chart of website sessions by channel, source, and landing page for the last 30 days.

The AI will connect to your Google Analytics data, group your sessions by channel (the inner ring), then by source/medium (the next ring), and finally by the top landing pages (the outer rings).

For an E-commerce Manager Using Shopify:

Create a sunburst visualization of our Shopify sales this year. Break it down by product category and then by product title.

Here, the 'whole' is your total sales. The first ring will show your main product categories (e.g., "Apparel," "Accessories," "Home Decor"), and each of those segments will then be subdivided in the next ring by individual products.

For a Sales Leader Using Salesforce:

Build a sunburst chart of our closed-won deal amount from Salesforce, grouped by sales rep and then by deal source.

This prompt gives you a visual breakdown of your team's performance. You can quickly see which reps are closing the most revenue (inner ring) and where their most valuable deals are coming from (outer ring).

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Step 3: Refine and Ask Follow-Up Questions

An AI-generated chart isn't a static image, it's a living dashboard that you can interact with. Your first chart often leads to more questions, and you can just ask them directly in the chat.

After creating the Google Analytics sunburst chart, you might ask:

• "Now filter this to only show traffic from mobile devices."
• "What percentage of overall traffic came from the 'google / organic' segment?"
• "Change the chart to show pageviews instead of sessions."

This conversational exchange lets you drill down and explore your data in a way that's impossible with a static spreadsheet chart. It turns your analysis process from grabbing numbers to having a conversation with your data.

Tips for Creating Effective Sunburst Charts

Whether you're using AI or a spreadsheet, some universal best practices will make your sunburst charts more effective:

• Keep it Simple: Don't overwhelm your audience. Limit your hierarchy to two or three rings for the clearest view. If you have more levels, consider if a different chart type, like a treemap, might work better.
• Use Color Thoughtfully: Group parent segments and their children with similar shades of the same color. This makes the hierarchy easier to follow visually. For example, everything under the "Social Media" category would be a shade of blue.
• Ensure Readable Labels: If your segment names are too long, they'll either be cut off or overlap, creating a visual mess. Use shortened names or rely on interactive tooltips that appear when someone hovers over a segment.
• The Center Matters: Make sure the center item clearly defines what you are visualizing. A simple "Total Sales: $500k" gives immediate context to everything else in the chart.

Final Thoughts

Sunburst charts are an excellent way to see both the big picture and the small details within your hierarchical data. They transform dense information into an easily understandable visual story. With the help of AI, you can now skip the tedious data preparation and chart-building process and get right to the insights, simply by asking for what you need.

At Graphed, we built our platform to do just this. After a one-time connection to your key data sources like Google Analytics, Shopify, and Salesforce, you can ask for charts and reports using natural language. We turn your request into a live, interactive dashboard instantly, so you can stop manually exporting CSVs and spend your time finding answers and making smarter decisions.