We forgot to release new data this month 😞... Now that we're past the cringey yet obligatory April fool's joke, welcome to the April 2024 release!

Places Highlights

• Key source refinements add hundreds of thousands of real POIs and remove hundreds of thousands of "fake" POIs 📈
• +204 new brands across 67 countries 🎉
• Polygon source updates:
  • Improvements to Geometry precision across the US 🇺🇸
  • Massive improvements to Geometry coverage in Spain 🇪🇸

Accuracy

SafeGraph evaluates the quality and completeness of our US POI data on a quarterly basis using two key metrics:

• Coverage Rate: The percentage of real and open SafeGraph POIs compared to the industry standard. In the US, this is Google.
• Real Open Rate: The percent of SafeGraph POIs we claim to be real and currently open compared to those that actually are real and open.

Each quarter, we randomly sample two zip codes (one urban and one rural) to measure our accuracy. This month we're looking at:

• 60601: Chicago, IL - Representative of Urban
• 80863: Woodland Park, CO - Representative of Rural

Here's the summary (full breakdown on the Metrics page):

Check out our Accuracy Metric Methodologies for more detailed info on how we arrived at these calculations.

Interested in a particular zip code for a future measurement? We're taking suggestions!

Places Growth

This month, SG Places has a grand total of 54,453,567, including POI with or without geometry, closed POI, and parking lots. This is a net decrease of 93,965 places from last month.

We refined our collection and ingest strategies for some key global sources, and this yielded +196k POIs in Canada 🇨🇦 , +46k POIs in 🇨🇳 , and +37k POIs in France 🇫🇷 among other countries. Aside from this effort, new brands is always our favorite tool for adding new places. This month, we added a grand total of 204 brands across 67 countries including:

• Agricultural Bank of China (SG_BRAND_2a4d94ba2c983f02) with 20,882 POIs 🏦
• OYO (SG_BRAND_869bdbc72aa33ba6) with 2,022 POIs 🏨
• International Paper Company (SG_BRAND_5abf2e68c3de0817) with 322 POIs 📃
• Beter Bed (SG_BRAND_ea2aebbc773f48cb) with 99 POIs 🛏
• Complete Nutrition (SG_BRAND_c4c6bd3f2b3b8146a7544065700755c4) with 29 POIs 💪

👀 Are we missing a brand or country? 👀 Please let us know here!

Refining key sources also resulted in better detection and removal of low quality POIs. We take pride in ridding our product of junk, so these net decreases are worth celebrating 🥳. The following countries saw the largest net decreases:

• Italy: -192k POIs 🇮🇹
• US: -77k POIs 🇺🇸
• Portugal: -23k POIs 🇵🇹
• Germany: -15k POIs 🇩🇪

Of course, you can always visit our Places Summary Stats to find more details on our continued growth.

Geometry Improvements

This month, we made two major updates to the building footprint datasets that power the Geometry product.

In Spain 🇪🇸, we added a nation-wide building footprint dataset. Our coverage of non-synthetic polygons in Spain rose from 3% of POIs in March to 91% in April 🚀.

In the US 🇺🇸, we ingested a new, more granular nationwide building footprint dataset. This new dataset not only reduced our US synthetic polygon rate from 3.3% in March to 2.6% in April, it also increased the overall precision of the polygons we are providing for our POIs. As shown in the image below, the new dataset features a higher density of polygons, and polygons are more granularly split along buildings' rooflines, allowing us to better capture each POI's unique footprint.

Drops ⬇️

• We are ingesting many sources and due to source changes and processing changes, Placekeys do drop over time. In this release, we dropped 2,570,861 Placekeys (187,606 branded and 2,383,255 non-branded).
  • We made some widespread improvements to location_name for transit stop POIs (naics_code like '485%' and geometry_type = 'POINT' ), which accounts for 1.54M drops globally. The POIs are still in the product, but they unfortunately have a new placekey. Please reach out to your customer success manager for help mapping back to the original placekey if this is a nuisance.