If one thing's for certain, it's that we don't "fool around" with Spring cleaning! Welcome to the April 2025 release notes. 🧹🧼

Places Highlights

• More than half a million new places globally 🌎 🌏
• Shopping malls in US and Canada get a makeover 🛍
• 59 new brands across 15 countries 🎉

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:

• 15222: Pittsburgh, PA - Representative of Urban
• 38843: Fulton, MS - 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 64,140,092, including POI with or without geometry, closed POI, and parking lots. This is a net increase of 512,702 places from last month 📈. The geographic footprint of a few of our primary sources expanded in the past month, which naturally resulted in more SafeGraph places upon updating. The following countries and categories saw the largest gains:

• Turkey: +440,970 POIs 🇹🇷 including:
  • naics_code = 722511 (Full-Service Restaurants): +55,096 POIs 🍽
  • naics_code = 722515 (Snack and Nonalcoholic Beverage Bars): +42,931 POIs 🥤🍪
  • naics_code = 81211 (Hair, Nail, and Skin Care Services): +34,639 POIs 💇‍♀️💅
• US: +89,955 POIs 🇺🇸 including:
  • naics_code = 236118 (Residential Remodelers): +24,517 POIs 🏠🛠
  • naics_code = 551114 (Corporate, Subsidiary, and Regional Managing Offices): +24,296 POIs 🏢
  • naics_code = 531210 (Offices of Real Estate Agents and Brokers): +21,792 POIs 💼 🏡
• Canada: +37,222 POIs 🇨🇦 including:
  • naics_code = 236118 (Residential Remodelers): +8,683 POIs 🏠🛠
  • naics_code = 551114 (Corporate, Subsidiary, and Regional Managing Offices): +6,216 POIs 🏢
  • naics_code = 541613 (Marketing Consulting Services): +2,593 POIs 🧑‍💼📈

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

US and Canada Malls Improvements

Since the start of 2025, we've selected a prominent category to strive for perfection each month. Recall our "Sporting and Performance Art Venues" push in January, our "Geometry Improvements for US Airports" in February, and a not quite release-note-worthy sprint to improve US Prisons in March. Our mission for each category sprint is simple:

1.) Coverage: Confirm we have all open places in the given category/country
2.) Precision: Ensure that only these places have the desired naics_code for the given category
3.) Geometry: Confirm the polygon_wkt reflects the real-world footprint and that spatial hierarchy (placekey >> parent_placekey) relationships are maintained for the smaller POIs on its premise.

This month, we're excited to release a much prettier version of US and Canada Malls(naics_code = 531120)! A heartfelt thank you is owed to our customers (you know who you are) who have provided endless feedback and patience as we've worked on a better solution.

Improvements summary in the April 2025 release:

• More Malls:
  • +2,782 in the US and +348 in Canada 📈
• Less Noise:
  • -1,598 US/Canada POIs previously categorized as malls (naics_code = 531120) that were either "not malls" or were duplicates of existing malls 📉.
    • Not only is this aesthetically prettier, but the decrease in duplicates means more concrete parent<>child relationships between the mall and its tenants (previously at risk of splitting b/w each of the malls in a duplicate pair).
• Better Polygons:
  • 4,500 US/Canada malls have a new, larger polygon that better reflects the entire footprint of the mall (previously too small and missing part of the mall's grounds).
  • 1,372 US/Canada malls changed polygon_class from "SHARED_POLYGON" to "OWNED_POLYGON"

Despite these large improvements, our US/Canada malls product is still a hair shy of perfection. Expect marginal improvements next month as we iron out the remaining issues, and please keep the feedback flowing!

Brands

This month, we added a grand total of 59 brands across 15 countries including:

• Inmedio (SG_BRAND_fecc7cca64cc962d) with 395 POIs 📰
• abercrombie kids (SG_BRAND_dfe4a38f8bb7ca52) with 176 POIs 👕
• VOX (SG_BRAND_f8cabb89eff65757) with 152 POIs 🛋
• Leafguard (SG_BRAND_74204e5048f765fa) with 52 POIs 🏠🍂
• BoSa Donuts (SG_BRAND_5a9c1bd92c45590d) with 44 POIs 🍩

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

Brand Openings and Closings

• We rely on POI metadata to track store openings and closings, and we are especially interested in understanding open/close dates for branded POIs. It can take more than a month to infer open/close dates, so we report brand open/close metrics on a one month delay.
• In this release, we flagged 1,937 brands with at least one store closure in February 2025 and 1,976 brands with at least one store opening in February 2025. Learn more about our open/close columns here.

Drops ⬇️

• We are ingesting many sources and due to source changes and processing changes, Placekeys do drop over time. In this release, we dropped 912,542 Placekeys (61,818 branded and 850,724 non-branded).